"Kasimutal Rameswaramvaraiyil terintavan."
"I beg your pardon," said the Archdeacon, turning to the interrupter.
"I beg yours. Tamil, Tamil proverb. Came into my mind. Spoke without
thinking. Beg yours."
"Not at all. Very interesting. You've lived in India? Would you mind
my asking you for a translation?"
"It means 'he knows everything between Benares and Rameswaram.' Last
time I heard it, an old Tamil, seventy or eighty years old, perhaps--he
looked a hundred--used it of one of your young men. The young man, by
the bye, had been a year and a half in India. D'you understand?"
"Well, I'm not sure I do: I've heard, of course, of Benares, but
Rameswaram, I don't seem to remember the name."
I laughed; I could not help it; the little Anglo-Indian looked so
fierce. "Ah!" he said, "you don't recollect the name. Well, it's
pretty famous out there. Great temple--Hindu--right at the southern
tip of India. Benares, you know, is up north. The old Tamil meant that
your friend knew everything in India after a year and a half: he
didn't, you know, after seventy, after seven thousand years. Perhaps
you also don't recollect that the Tamils are Dravidians? They've been
there since the beginning of time, before we came, or the Dutch or
Portuguese or the Muhammadans, or our cousins, the other Aryans.
Uncivilized, black? Perhaps, but, if they're black, after all it's
_their_ suns, through thousands of years, that have blackened them.
They ought to know, if anyone does: but they don't, they don't pretend
to. But you two gentlemen, you seem to know everything between
Kasimutal--that's Benares--and Rameswaram, without having seen the
sun at all."
"My dear sir," began the Archdeacon pompously, but the jobber
interrupted him. He had had a number of whiskies and sodas, and was
quite heated. "It's very easy to sneer: it doesn't mean because you've
lived a few years in a place..."
"I? Thirty. But they--seven thousand at least."
"I say, it doesn't mean because you've lived thirty years in a place
that you know all about it. Ramisram, or whatever the damned place is
called, I've never heard of it and don't want to. You do, that's part of
your job, I expect. But I read the papers, I've read books too, mind you,
about India. I know what's going on. One knows enough--enough--data:
East and West and the difference: I can form an opinion--I've a right
to it even if I've never heard of Ramis what d'you call it. You've lived
there and you can't see the wood for the trees. We see it because we're
out of it--see it at a distance."
"Perhaps," said the Archdeacon "there's a little misunderstanding. The
discussion--if I may say so--is getting a little heated--unnecessarily,
I think. We hold our views. This gentleman has lived in the country. He
holds others. I'm sure it would be most interesting to hear them. But I
confess I didn't quite gather them from what he said."
The little man was silent: he sat back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Then he smiled:
"I won't give you views," he said. "But if you like I'll give you what
you call details, things seen, facts. Then you can give me _your_
views on 'em."
They murmured approval.
"Let's see, it's fifteen, seventeen years ago. I had a district then
about as big as England. There may have been twenty Europeans in it,
counting the missionaries, and twenty million Tamils and Telegus. I
expect nineteen millions of the Tamils and Telegus never saw a white
man from one year's end to the other, or if they did, they caught a
glimpse of me under a sun helmet riding through their village on a
fleabitten grey Indian mare. Well, Providence had so designed it that
there was a stretch of coast in that district which was a barren
wilderness of sand and scrubby thorn jungle--and nothing else--for
three hundred miles; no towns, no villages, no water, just sand and
trees for three hundred miles. O, and sun, I forgot that, blazing
sun. And in the water off the shore at one place there were oysters,
millions of them lying and breeding at the bottom, four or five fathoms
down. And in the oysters, or some of them, were pearls."
Well, we rule India and the sea, so the sea belongs to us, and the
oysters are in the sea and the pearls are in the oysters. Therefore
of course the pearls belong to us. But they lie in five fathoms. How
to get 'em up, that's the question. You'd think being progressive
we'd dredge for them or send down divers in diving dresses. But we
don't, not in India. They've been fishing up the oysters and the pearls
there ever since the beginning of time, naked brown men diving feet
first out of long wooden boats into the blue sea and sweeping the
oysters off the bottom of the sea into baskets slung to their sides.
They were doing it centuries and centuries before we came, when--as
someone said--our ancestors were herding swine on the plains of Norway.
The Arabs of the Persian Gulf came down in dhows and fished up pearls
which found their way to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. They still
come, and the Tamils and Moormen of the district come, and they fish
'em up in the same way, diving out of long wooden boats shaped and
rigged as in Solomon's time, as they were centuries before him and the
Queen of Sheba. No difference, you see, except that we--Government
I mean--take two-thirds of all the oysters fished up: the other third
we give to the diver, Arab or Tamil or Moorman, for his trouble
in fishing 'em up.
We used to have a Pearl Fishery about once in three years. It lasted
six weeks or two months just between the two monsoons, the only time
the sea is calm there. And I had, of course, to go and superintend it,
to take Government's share of oysters, to sell them, to keep order, to
keep out K. D.'s--that means Known Depredators--and smallpox and
cholera. We had what we called a camp, in the wilderness, remember, on
the hot sand down there by the sea: it sprang up in a night, a town, a
big town of thirty or forty thousand people, a little India, Asia
almost, even a bit of Africa. They came from all districts: Tamils,
Telegus, fat Chetties, Parsees, Bombay merchants, Sinhalese from
Ceylon, the Arabs and their negroes, Somalis probably, who used to be
their slaves. It was an immense gamble; everyone bought oysters for
the chance of the prizes in them: it would have taken fifty white men
to superintend that camp properly; they gave me one, a little boy of
twenty-four fresh-cheeked from England, just joined the service.
He had views, he had been educated in a Board School, won prizes,
scholarships, passed the Civil Service 'Exam'. Yes, he had views;
he used to explain them to me when he first arrived. He got some new
ones I think before he got out of that camp. You'd say he only saw
details, things happen, facts, data. Well, he did that too. He saw
men die--he hadn't seen that in his Board School--die of plague or
cholera, like flies, all over the place, under the trees, in the
boats, outside the little door of his own little hut. And he saw
flies, too, millions, billions of them all day long buzzing, crawling
over everything, his hands, his little fresh face, his food. And he
smelt the smell of millions of decaying oysters all day long and all
night long for six weeks. He was sick four or five times a day for
six weeks; the smell did that. Insanitary? Yes, very. Why is it allowed?
The pearls, you see, the pearls; you must get them out of the oysters
as you must get the oysters out of the sea. And the pearls are very
often small and embedded in the oyster's body. So you put all the
oysters, millions of them, in dug-out canoes in the sun to rot. They
rot very well in that sun, and the flies come and lay eggs in them,
and maggots come out of the eggs and more flies come out of the
maggots; and between them all, the maggots and the sun, the oysters'
bodies disappear, leaving the pearls and a little sand at the bottom
of the canoe. Unscientific? Yes, perhaps; but after all it's our
camp, our fishery--just as it was in Solomon's time? At any rate, you
see, it's the East. But whatever it is, and whatever the reason, the
result involves flies, millions of them and a smell, a stench--Lord!
I can smell it now.
There was one other white man there. He was a planter, so he said,
and he had come to "deal in," pearls. He dropped in on us out of a
native boat at sunset on the second day. He had a red face and a red
nose, he was unhealthily fat for the East: the whites of his eyes
were rather blue and rather red; they were also watery. I noticed
that his hand shook, and that he first refused and then took a whisky
and soda--a bad sign in the East. He wore very dirty white clothes
and a vest instead of a shirt; he apparently had no baggage of any
sort. But he was a white man, and so he ate with us that night and a
good many nights afterwards.
In the second week he had his first attack of D. T. We pulled him
through, Robson and I, in the intervals of watching over the oysters.
When he hadn't got D. T., he talked: he was a great talker, he also
had views. I used to sit in the evenings--they were rare--when the
fleet of boats had got in early and the oysters had been divided, in
front of my hut and listen to him and Robson settling India and Asia,
Africa too probably. We sat there in our long chairs on the sand
looking out over the purple sea, towards a sunset like blood shot
with gold. Nothing moved or stirred except the flies which were going
to sleep in a mustard tree close by; they hung in buzzing dusters,
billions of them on the smooth leaves and little twigs; literally it
was black with them. It looked as if the whole tree had suddenly
broken out all over into some disease of living black currants. Even
the sea seemed to move with an effort in the hot, still air; only now
and again a little wave would lift itself up very slowly, very wearily,
poise itself for a moment, and then fall with a weary little thud
on the sand.
I used to watch them, I say, in the hot still air and the smell of
dead oysters--it pushed up against your face like something
solid--talking, talking in their long chairs, while the sweat stood
out in little drops on their foreheads and trickled from time to time
down their noses. There wasn't, I suppose, anything wrong with Robson,
he was all right at bottom, but he annoyed me, irritated me in that
smell. He was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his School Board
education, of life, of his 'views'. He was going to run India on
new lines, laid down in some damned Manual of Political Science out
of which they learn life in Board Schools and extension lectures. He
would run his own life, I daresay, on the same lines, laid down in
some other text book or primer. He hadn't seen anything, but he knew
exactly what it was all like. There was nothing curious, astonishing,
unexpected, in life, he was ready for any emergency. And we were all
wrong, all on the wrong tack in dealing with natives! He annoyed
me a little, you know, when the thermometer stood at 99, at 6 P.M., but
what annoyed me still more was that they--the natives!--were all
wrong too. They too had to be taught how to live--and die, too, I
gathered.
But his views were interesting, very interesting--especially in the
long chairs there under the immense Indian sky, with the camp at our
hands--just as it had been in the time of Moses and Abraham--and
behind us the jungle for miles, and behind that India, three hundred
millions of them listening to the piping voice of a Board School boy,
are the inferior race, these three hundred millions--mark race,
though there are more races in India than people in Peckham--and we,
of course, are superior. They've stopped somehow on the bottom rung
of the ladder of which we've very nearly, if not quite, reached the
top. They've stopped there hundreds, thousands of years; but it won't
take any time to lead 'em up by the hand to our rung. It's to be done
like this: by showing them that they're our brothers, inferior
brothers; by reason, arguing them out of their superstitions, false
beliefs; by education, by science, by example, yes, even he did
not forget example, and White, sitting by his side with his red nose
and watery eyes, nodded approval. And all this must be done
scientifically, logically, systematically: if it were, a Commissioner
could revolutionize a province in five years, turn it into a Japanese
India, with all the riots as well as all the vakils and students
running up the ladder of European civilization to become, I suppose,
glorified Board School angels at the top. "But you've none of you got
any clear plans out here," he piped, "you never work on any system;
you've got no point of view. The result is"--here, I think, he
was inspired, by the dead oysters, perhaps--"instead or getting hold
of the East, it's the East which gets hold of you."
And White agreed with him, solemnly, at any rate when he was sane
and sober. And I couldn't complain of his inexperience. He was rather
reticent at first, but afterwards we heard much--too much--of his
experiences--one does, when a man gets D. T. He said he was a
gentleman, and I believe it was true; he had been to a public school,
Cheltenham or Repton. He hadn't, I gathered, succeeded as a gentleman
at home, so they sent him to travel in the East. He liked it, it suited
him. So he became a planter in Assam. That was fifteen years ago, but
he didn't like Assam: the luck was against him--it always was--and he
began to roll; and when a man starts rolling in India, well--He had
been a clerk in merchants' offices; he had Served in a draper's shop
in Calcutta; but the luck was always against him. Then he tramped up
and down India, through Ceylon, Burma; he had got at one time or another
to the Malay States, and, when he was very bad one day, he talked of
cultivating camphor in Java. He had been a sailor on a coasting tramp;
he had sold horses (which didn't belong to him) in the Deccan somewhere;
he had tramped day after day begging his way for months in native
bazaars; he had lived for six months with, and on, a Tamil woman in
some little village down in the south. Now he was 'dealing in' pearls.
"India's got hold of me," he'd say, "India's got hold of me and the
East."
He had views too, very much like Robson's, with additions. 'The
strong hand' came in, and 'rule'. We ought to govern India more; we
didn't now. Why, he had been in hundreds of places where he was the
first Englishman that the people had ever seen. (Lord! think of that!)
He talked a great deal about the hidden wealth of India and
exploitation. He knew places where there was gold--workable too--only
one wanted a little capital--coal probably and iron--and then there
was this new stuff, radium. But we weren't go-ahead, progressive, the
Government always put difficulties in his way. They made 'the native'
their stalking-horse against European enterprise. He would work for
the good of the native, he'd treat him firmly but kindly--especially,
I thought, the native women, for his teeth were sharp and pointed and
there were spaces between each, and there was something about his chin
and jaw--_you_ know the type, I expect.
As the fishing went on we had less time to talk. We had to work. The
divers go out in the fleet of three hundred or four hundred boats
every night and dive until midday. Then they sail back from the pearl
banks and bring all their oysters into an immense Government enclosure
where the Government share is taken. If the wind is favourable, all
the boats get back by 6 P.M. and the work is over at 7. But if the wind
starts blowing off shore, the fleet gets scattered and boats drop in
one by one all night long. Robson and I had to be in the enclosure as
long as there was a boat out, ready to see that, as soon as it did get
in, the oysters were brought to the enclosure and Government got its
share.
Well, the wind never did blow favourably that year. I sat in that
enclosure sometimes for forty-eight hours on end. Robson found
managing it rather difficult, so he didn't like to be left there
alone. If you get two thousand Arabs, Tamils, Negroes, and Moormen,
each with a bag or two of oysters, into an enclosure a hundred and
fifty yards by a hundred and fifty yards, and you only have thirty
timid native 'subordinates' and twelve native policemen to control
them--well, somehow or other he found a difficulty in applying his
system of reasoning to them. The first time he tried it, we very
nearly had a riot; it arose from a dispute between some Arabs and
Tamils over the ownership of three oysters which fell out of a bag.
The Arabs didn't understand Tamil and the Tamils didn't understand
Arabic, and, when I got down there, fetched by a frightened constable,
there were sixty of seventy men fighting with great poles--they
had pulled up the fence of the enclosure for weapons--and on the
outskirts was Robson running round like a districted hen with a white
face and tears in his blue eyes. When we got the combatants separated,
they had only killed one Tamil and broken nine or ten heads. Robson
was very upset by that dead Tamil, he broke down utterly for a minute
or two, I'm afraid.
Then White got his second attack. He was very bad: he wanted to kill
himself, but what was worse than that, before killing himself, he
wanted to kill other people. I hadn't been to bed for two nights and
I knew I should have to sit up another night in that enclosure as the
wind was all wrong again. I had given White a bed in my hut: it wasn't
good to let him wander in the bazaar. Robson came down with a white
face to tell me he had 'gone mad up there again'. I had to knock him
down with the butt end of a rifle; he was a big man and I hadn't slept
for forty bight hours, and then there were the flies and the smell of
those dead oysters.
It sounds unreal, perhaps a nightmare, all this told here to you
behind blinds and windows in this--"he sniffed--" in this smell
of--of--horsehair furniture and paint and varnish. The curious
thing is it didn't seem a nightmare out there. It was too real. Things
happened, anything might happen, without shocking or astonishing. One
just did one's work, hour after hour, keeping things going in that
sun which stung one's bare hands, took the skin off even my face,
among the flies add the smell. It wasn't a nightmare, it was just a
few thousand Arabs and Indians fishing tip oysters from the bottom
of the sea. It wasn't even new, one felt; it was old, old as the
Bible, old as Adam, so the Arabs said. One hadn't much time to think,
but one felt it and watched it, watched the things happen quietly,
unastonished, as men do in the East. One does one's work,--forty
eight hours at a stretch doesn't leave one much time or inclination
for thinking,--waiting for things to happen. If you can prevent people
from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the
camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can
manage to get one night's sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied;
one doesn't much worry about having to knock a mad gentleman from
Repton on the head with the butt end of a rifle between-whiles.
I expect that's just what Robson would call 'not getting hold of
India but letting India get hold of you.' Well, I said I wouldn't
give you views and I won't: I'm giving you facts: what I want, you
know, too is to give you the feeling of facts out there. After all
that is data for your views, isn't it? Things here _feel_ so
different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and
curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never
wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. You
are always doing things somehow--Lord knows what they are--according
I suppose to systems, views, opinions. But out there you live so near
to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much
in your tin bath. And things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and
you--you don't do things, you watch with the three hundred millions.
You feel it there in everything, even in the sunrise and sunset, every
day, the immensity, inexorableness, mystery of things happening. You
feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of
sky; you feel small, not very powerful. But who ever felt the sun set
or rise in London or Torquay either? It doesn't: you just turn on or
turn off the electric light.
White was very bad that night. When he recovered from being knocked
down by the rifle, I had to tie him down to the bed. And then Robson
broke down--nerves, you know. I had to go back to the enclosure and I
wanted him to stay and look after White in the hut--it wasn't safe
to leave him alone even tied down with cord to the camp bed. But
this was apparently another emergency to which the manual system did
not apply. He couldn't face it alone in the hut with that man tied to
the bed. White was certainly not a pretty sight writhing about there,
and his face--have you ever seen a man in the last stages of D.T.? I
beg pour pardon, I suppose you haven't. It isn't nice, and White was
also seeing things, not nice either: not snakes you know as people do
in novels when they get D.T., but things which had happened to him,
and things which he had done--they weren't nice either--and curious
ordinary things distorted in a most unpleasant way. He was very much
troubled by snipe: hundreds of them kept on rising out of the
bed from beside him with that shrill 'cheep! cheep!' of theirs: he
felt their soft little feathered bodies against his bare skin as they
fluttered up from under him somewhere and flew out of the window.
It threw him into paroxysms of fear, agonies: it made one, I admit,
feel chilly round the heart to hear him pray one to stop it.
And Robson was also not a nice sight. I hate seeing a sane man break
down with fear, mere abject fear. He just sat down at last on a
cane-bottomed chair and cried like a baby. Well, that did him some
good, but he wasn't fit to be left alone with White. I had to take
White down to the enclosure, and I tied him to a post with coir rope
near the table at which I sat there. There was nothing else to do. And
Robson came too and sat there at my side through the night watching
White, terrified but fascinated.
Can you picture that enclosure to yourself down on the sandy shore
with its great fence of rough poles cut in the jungle, lighted by a
few flares, torches dipped in cocoanut oil: and the white man tied to
a pole raving, writhing in the flickering light which just showed too
Robson's white scared little face? And in the intervals of taking
over oysters and settling disputes between Arabs and Somalis and
Tamils and Moormen, I sat at the table writing a report (which had to
go by runner next morning) on a proposal to introduce the teaching
of French in 'English schools' in towns. That wasn't a very good
report. White gave us the whole history of his life between ten P.M.
and four A.M. in the morning. He didn't leave much to the imagination;
a parson would have said that in that hour the memory of his sins came
upon him--O, I beg your pardon. But really I think they did. I thought
I had lived long enough out there to have heard without a shock anything
that men can do and do do--especially white men who have 'gone under'.
But I hadn't: I couldn't stomach the story of White's life told by
himself. It wasn't only that he had robbed and swindled himself through
India Up and down for fifteen years. That was bad enough, for there
wasn't a station where he hadn't swindled and bamboozled his fellow
white men. But it was what he had done when he got away 'among the
natives'--to men, and women too, away from 'civilization', in the
jungle villages and high up in the mountains. God! the cold, civilized,
corrupted cruelty of it. I told you, I think, that his teeth were
pointed and spaced out in his mouth.
And his remorse was the most horrible thing, tied to that post
there, writhing under the flickering light of the flare: the remorse
of fear--fear of punishment, of what was coming, of death, of the
horrors, real horrors and the phantom horrors of madness.
Often during the night there was nothing to be heard in the enclosure
but his screams, curses, hoarse whispers of fear. We seemed alone
there in the vast stillness of the sky: only now and then a little
splash from the sea down on the shore. And then would come a confused
murmur from the sea and a little later perhaps the wailing voice of
one man calling to another from boat to boat across the water "Abdulla!
Abdulla!" And I would go out on to the shore. There were boats, ten,
fifteen, twenty, perhaps, coming in from the banks, sad, mysterious,
in the moonlight, gliding in with the little splashing of the great
round oars. Except for the slow moving of the oars one would have
thought they were full of the dead, there was not a movement on board,
until the boats touched the sand. Then the dark shadows, which lay
like dead men about the boats, would leap into life--there would
rise a sudden din of hoarse voices, shouting, calling, quarrelling.
The boats swarmed with shadows running about, gesticulating, staggering
under sacks of oysters, dropping one after the other over the boats'
sides into the sea. The sea was full of them and soon the shore too,
Arabs, negroes, Tamils, bowed under the weight of the sacks. They came
up dripping from the sea. They burst with a roar into the enclosure:
they flung down their sacks of oysters with a crash. The place was
full of swaying struggling forms: of men calling to one another in
their different tongues: of the smell of the sea.
And above everything one could hear the screams and prayers of the
madman writhing at the post. They gathered about him, stared at him.
The light of the flares fell on their dark faces, shining and dripping
from the sea. They looked calm, impassive, stern. It shone too on the
circle of eyes: one saw the whites of them all round him: they seemed
to be judging him, weighing him: calm patient eyes of men who watched
unastonished the procession of things. The Tamils' squat black figures
nearly naked watched him silently, almost carelessly. The Arabs in
their long dirty nightshirts, blackbearded, discussed him earnestly
together with their guttural voices. Only an enormous negro, towering
up to six feet six at least above the crowd, dressed in sacks and an
enormous ulster, with ten copper coffee pots slung over his back and
a pipe made of a whole cocoanut with an iron tube stuck in it in his
hand, stood smiling mysteriously.
And White thought they weren't real, that they were devils of Hell
sent to plague and torture him. He cursed them, whispered at them,
howled with fear. I had to explain to them that the Sahib was not well,
that the sun had touched him, that they must move away. They understood.
They salaamed quietly, and moved away slowly, dignified.
I don't know how many times this didn't happen during the night. But
towards morning White began to grow very weak. He moaned perpetually.
Then he began to be troubled by the flesh. As dawn showed grey in the
east, he was suddenly shaken by convulsions horrible to see. He
screamed for someone to bring him a woman, and, as he screamed, his
head fell back: he was dead. I cut the cords quickly in a terror of
haste, and covered the horror of the face. Robson was sitting in a
heap in his chair: he was sobbing, his face in his hands.
At that moment I was told I was wanted on the shore. I went quickly.
The sea looked cold and grey under the faint light from the East. A
cold little wind just ruffled the surface of the water. A solitary
boat stood out black against the sky, just throbbing slowly up and
down on the water close in shore. They had a dead Arab on board, he
had died suddenly while diving, they wanted my permission to bring
the body ashore. Four men waded out to the boat: the corpse was lifted
out and placed upon their shoulders. They waded back slowly: the feet
of the dead man stuck out, toes pointing up, very stark, over the
shoulders of the men in front. The body was laid on the sand. The
bearded face of the dead man looked very calm, very dignified in the
faint light. An Arab, his brother, sat down upon the sand near his
head. He covered himself with sackcloth. I heard him weeping. It
was very silent, very cold and still on the shore in the early dawn.
A tall figure stepped forward, it was the Arab sheik, the leader of
the boat. He laid his hand on the head of the weeping man and spoke
to him calmly, eloquently, compassionately. I didn't understand Arabic,
but I could understand what he was saying. The dead man had lived, had
worked, had died. He had died working, without suffering, as men should
desire to die. He had left a son behind him. The speech went on calmly,
eloquently, I heard continually the word Khallas--all is over,
finished. I watched the figures outlined against the grey sky--the
long lean outline of the corpse with the toes sticking up so straight
and stark, the crouching huddled figure of the weeping man and the
tall upright sheik standing by his side. They were motionless, sombre,
mysterious, part of the grey sea, of the grey sky.
Suddenly the dawn broke red in the sky. The sheik stopped, motioned
silently to the four men. They lifted the dead man on to their
shoulders. They moved away down the shore by the side of the sea
which began to stir under the cold wind. By their side walked the
sheik, his hand laid gently on the brother's arm. I watched them
move away, silent, dignified. And over the shoulders of the men I
saw the feet of the dead man with the toes sticking up straight
and stark.
Then I moved away too, to make arrangements for White's burial:
it had to be done at once.
* * * *
There was silence in the smoking-room. I looked round. The Colonel
had fallen asleep with his mouth open. The jobber tried to look
bored, the Archdeacon was, apparently, rather put out.
"Its too late, I think," said the Archdeacon, "to--Dear me, dear
me, past one o'clock". He got up. "Don't you think you've chosen
rather exceptional circumstances, out of the ordinary case?"
The Commissioner was looking into the few red coals that were all
that was left of the fire.
"There's another Tamil proverb," he said: "When the cat puts his
head into a pot, he thinks all is darkness."