Krishnaswami got the book from a pavement seller near Avenue Road for four rupees. The seller wanted ten, but Krishnaswami pointed out that the cover was hanging by a thread and a cockroach had once lived in the spine. The seller said that only showed how much it had been loved. They settled on four. It was *The Human Machine* by Arnold Bennett, an Englishman Krishnaswami had never heard of. He bought it mainly because the title made him think of the lathe at the factory where he had worked as a supervisor for twenty-two years.
That night he read it on the verandah under the forty-watt bulb his wife refused to replace "until it fuses properly." He had expected something about machines. Instead the Englishman talked about days. A day, the book seemed to say, was the most ordinary thing that could happen to a man. It came seven times a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for as long as he lived. And yet a single day might hold a whole life, summer, winter, autumn and spring, if only a man knew how to meet it.
Krishnaswami put the book down and looked at the coconut tree in the neighbour's compound. "How to meet it," he said aloud.
"Meet whom?" his wife Kamakshi called from the kitchen.
"The day."
"Meet it tomorrow. It is ten o'clock. Switch off that bulb, it is eating current."
He switched it off. But in the dark he kept thinking. Every morning, he admitted to himself, he woke up fairly peaceful. Sleep had wiped the slate clean. Then, within half an hour, something began to grind. The coffee was too hot or not hot enough. The milkman was late. The newspaper boy flung the paper into the drain with a skill that could only be deliberate. Every one of these things set off a voice in his head: *Careless fellow. Nobody in this country does his job. If I were in charge...* The voice chattered all through his bath. By the time someone actually crossed him, the chatter had already turned into words, loud ones, and Kamakshi would say, "Why are you shouting? Who did anything to you?"
That was the friction, he decided. And the friction did not come from the milkman. It came from inside him, from the habit of passing judgement on everything before he had even finished brushing his teeth. The Englishman would have called it his mental tone. If the mental tone was sour, the voice that came out of his mouth would be sour too. So why not school the mental tone every day, the way one oils a machine before switching it on? Lubrication. He liked the word. It sounded technical and spiritual at once.
He fell asleep resolving to be lubricated.
The milkman was late the next morning. Krishnaswami stood at the gate with the vessel and felt the familiar engine start up inside him: *Twenty minutes late. Every day some excuse. His cow must be...*
He caught himself. *Lubrication,* he said silently. *The man has perhaps forty houses. Perhaps his bicycle chain came off.* He breathed in and looked at the sky, which was a pleasant grey. When the milkman finally came pedalling round the corner, Krishnaswami said, "Ah, you've come," in a tone so mild that the man stared at him and asked if he was feeling well.
He went inside very pleased with himself, the way a man feels after the first day of a new diet. He sat down for coffee. Kamakshi put the tumbler in front of him. He took a sip, and it was lukewarm.
"This coffee is like canal water! How many times have I..."
The words were out and filling the kitchen before he knew it. Kamakshi turned round with the ladle in her hand. Their son, who was reading the cricket scores, looked up with real interest.
Krishnaswami sat there with his mouth still slightly open. He remembered a line he had read the night before and had thought very clever: *The tone was out of my mouth before my brain woke up.* He had been awake for an hour and a quarter, had successfully lubricated himself over the milkman, and still the brain had been asleep at the one moment it was needed.
"I am sorry," he said. "The coffee is fine."
"It is not fine," said Kamakshi. "It is cold. The gas cylinder is finishing. I told you on Tuesday to book a new one." She put the tumbler back on the stove.
So there had been a reason after all, and the reason was partly him. He considered this while she heated the coffee. Blame, he thought, was a stone thrown into a well. You never knew whose head it would come back up on.
He did not become a new man after that. His son, who was cynical about such things, watched for a week and announced that his father was "sixty per cent improved, but not on Mondays." Krishnaswami thought that was a fair assessment. Each morning he now sat on the verandah for five minutes before coffee, doing nothing at all. Kamakshi was suspicious at first and thought it was a new kind of sulk. Later she decided it was harmless, like his habit of reading the obituaries.
What he did in those five minutes was simply listen to the voice in his head before it got a chance to reach his mouth. Some days it said nothing much. Some days it was already passing judgement on people he would not meet till noon. He let it talk, the way one lets a radio play in another room, and did not obey it.
The newspaper boy still threw the paper into the drain. But one morning Krishnaswami, fishing it out with a stick, found himself laughing at how precisely it had landed every time.
"A boy with such aim," he told Kamakshi, "should be playing for the state."
She looked at him the way she had once looked at the four-rupee book, as if she wasn't sure he was worth what he'd cost, and then she went to warm his coffee before he had asked!