“You certainly were lucky.”
“And on top of that amazing good luck,” Ranga went on, “there was the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew MacPhail. Has Dr. Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?”
“Just a few words, that’s all.”
“Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?”
Will shook his head.
“The Experimental Station,” said Ranga, “had a lot to do with our population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr. Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People died like flies. There’s a famous passage in Dr. Andrew’s memoirs about the famine. A description and then a comment. He’d had to listen to a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’—that was the text, and the preacher had been so eloquent that several people were converted. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death.”
“Another of the cosmic jokes,” said Will. “And this one was formulated by Jesus himself. ‘To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have’—the bare possibility of being human. It’s the cruelest of all God’s jokes, and also the commonest. I’ve seen it being played on millions of men and women, millions of small children—all over the world.”
“So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible impression on Dr. Andrew’s mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties we built the first superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children.
Ten years after the founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr. Andrew foresaw, Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What was to be done? Dr. Andrew had read his Malthus. ‘Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by famine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint.’”
“Mor-ral r-restr-raint,” the little nurse repeated, rolling her r’s in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. “Mor-ralr-restr-raint! Incidentally,” she added, “Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja’s sixteen-year-old niece.”
“And that,” said Ranga, “was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control.”
“And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?”
“Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six children five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about maithuna and, being a true man of science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction.”
“With what results?”
“Enthusiastic approval.”
“That’s the way everybody feels about it,” said Radha.
“Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some feel that way, others don’t. Dr. Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education—free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love.”
“Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?”
“It wasn’t really so difficult. Maithuna was orthodox. People weren’t being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning something esoteric.”
“And don’t forget the most important point of all,” the little nurse chimed in. “For women—all women, and I don’t care what you say about sweeping generalizations—the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed.” There was a brief silence. “And now,” she resumed in another, brisker tone, “it’s high time we left you to your siesta.”
“Before you go,” said Will, “I’d like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I’m alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives.”
Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert’s study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.
“Veni, vidi,” Will scrawled. “I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this basis? If you cable Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing.”
“There,” he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. “May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow’s plane?”
“Without fail,” the boy promised.
Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were accustomed. Or couldn’t they?
From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. “No reading now,” she wagged her finger at him. “Go to sleep.”
“I never sleep during the day,” Will assured her, with a certain perverse satisfaction.
7
HE COULD NEVER GO TO SLEEP DURING THE DAY; BUT WHEN HE looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What’s What, and resumed his interrupted reading:
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth:
Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty
