Barefoot steps

I told Ronny and Adela about my meeting with the doctor. Suddenly Ronny cried out: 'Good gracious! Not a Mohammedan?' He started questioning me.

'He called you in the mosque? How? Impudently? So he said something about your shoes? He asked you to take them off? It's an old trick, you know. I wish you hadn't taken them off. You oughtn't to have answered him.'
He sounded agitated, but after a while he calmed and pointed at the river below us.
'There's your Ganges. And that's the way the dead bodies float, from Benares to Chandrapore', he added.
'Dead bodies?', I asked.
'You won't see many of them here', he said. The crocodiles won't let them get this far.'
'What a terrible river!', I said. 'But what a wonderful river also', I thought

At the bungalow Ronny continued his questioning. But when I said that the doctor had offered to show me the Minto Hospital he seemed relieved and said that his name must be Aziz and that he was quite all right, nothing suspicious about him. I was puzzled. Although Ronny hadn't changed, he said things I never would have expected of him.

The heat and the conversation had made me tired. We said goodnight. In my room, I wanted to hang up my cloak, but there was a wasp at the tip of the peg. It had long yellow legs and seemed asleep. Where did it come from? Suddenly I was wide awake. Since my encounter with the doctor, I had been questioning myself. I had been trying to find out where I came from, and how I got here. And with 'here' I don't mean India or Chandrapore, but this story.

When I stepped into it (at page 14 of the 1979 Penguin edition) I was an elderly lady already. I had three children, lost two husbands — I had a history, a life. The doctor in the mosque had said that at first he thought I was a ghost. But when he called at me I had responded as a living person, a real human being. At the same time I somehow knew that my barefoot steps in the mosque were my first steps in this life and that this life was a fictional life. And that Chandrapore was a fictional village with a cardboard mosque.