Ranganathan had read Arnold Bennett's *The Human Machine* at the age of fifty-two. He found it at a pavement bookstall near Malleswaram 8th Cross for four rupees, and the seller threw in a calendar from 1987 for nothing. He read the book in two evenings on his verandah, his reading glasses slipping down his nose. When he finished it, he told his wife Kamala that he was a changed man.
"Changed into what?" she asked from the kitchen, not looking up from the dosa pan.
"Into a man who is master of his own brain," he said. "Bennett says the brain is a machine and a man must drive it, not be driven by it."
Kamala made a small noise that could have meant anything.
That night he sat at the dining table with a fountain pen he hadn't used since his son's wedding. On the back of an old invitation card he copied out, in his best clerical hand, the sentences he planned to say to himself whenever anger came over him:
*I am making a donkey of myself. Understand? Yes, a Preposterous Donkey. I am behaving like an infant. I look like a fool in front of others…*
He wrote it all out down to the last line, *a donkey whose reasoning has been put out by the fire called Instinct!* Then he underlined *Preposterous* twice, because he liked the word. He folded the card and put it in his shirt pocket, behind his pen. From that day it went from one shirt to the next with the care a devout man gives a sacred thread.
For eleven days nothing tested him. He told everyone at the bank about his new philosophy. He told the peon Muniswamy, who nodded respectfully and asked for an advance on his salary. He told Sharma, who sat at the next desk. Sharma said his own grandfather never got angry in ninety years, but that was because he was deaf.
On the twelfth day the test came, as tests do, in the form of an autorickshaw.
Ranganathan had come out of the vegetable market on Sampige Road carrying a cloth bag of drumsticks and a pumpkin that Kamala had insisted on. He waved down an auto. The driver was a young man with a moustache that looked as if he had worked hard on it. He looked at Ranganathan, then at the pumpkin, and said, "Hundred and twenty."
"It is barely two kilometres," Ranganathan said. "Put the meter."
"Meter is not working, sir."
"Then make it work."
"How can I make it work, sir? Am I a mechanic?"
Ranganathan felt it begin. It started as a warmth around his ears and moved down into his chest. It was exactly as Bennett had described. He knew he should not argue with an auto driver on Sampige Road at eleven in the morning, but his mouth had already opened. "You fellows are all the same! Daylight robbery! I have lived in this city forty years, and I know what a two-kilometre ride costs…"
A small crowd began to gather. Nothing gathers a crowd in Bangalore faster than two men arguing about money. A flower seller stopped stringing jasmine. A boy on a bicycle put one foot down to watch.
Then, in the middle of his own sentence, Ranganathan remembered the card. He stopped talking and put his hand to his shirt pocket. He unfolded the card with trembling dignity and began to read it aloud, firmly, because Bennett had said the words must be spoken with conviction:
"I am making a donkey of myself!"
The auto driver blinked.
"Understand? Yes!" Ranganathan went on, raising his voice over a passing bus. "A Preposterous Donkey!"
The driver's face darkened. "Who are you calling donkey, sir?"
"Not you. Me."
"You are looking at me and saying donkey."
"I am behaving like an infant," Ranganathan read on doggedly, because he had to finish now. "I look like a fool in front of others…"
"Correct," said the flower seller, to general approval.
"…like an arrant ass. A pitiable object of contempt…"
By now the driver had got out of his auto. He was appealing to the crowd. "You see, madam? You see, anna? I quote one fare, and he takes out a paper and abuses me in English!"
An elderly man with a walking stick stepped in. Every Bangalore street keeps one in reserve for exactly this kind of situation. He took the card from Ranganathan, held it at arm's length, read it slowly, and handed it back. "He is not abusing you," he told the driver in Kannada. "He is abusing himself. It is some kind of medicine."
The driver looked at Ranganathan with new interest, and something close to pity. "Sit, sir," he said gently, the way one speaks to a man recovering from a fever. "Eighty rupees. Sit."
Ranganathan sat with his pumpkin on his lap. He said nothing the whole way home. At the gate the driver refused the extra ten rupees. "Keep it, sir. Take care of your health."
At lunch Kamala heard the whole story twice, first from him and then, much better, from the woman next door, whose sister had been buying jasmine on Sampige Road at the time.
"So," Kamala said, serving him a second helping of sambar, "your Bennett worked."
"How did it work? The whole street laughed at me."
"But you stopped being angry, didn't you?"
He thought about it. It was true. Somewhere between *arrant ass* and *pitiable object of contempt*, the fire had gone out. There had simply been no room left in him for anger and embarrassment at once.
"Bennett did not say to read it aloud," he admitted.
"No," said Kamala. "Bennett was an Englishman. He must have said it quietly, inside."
Ranganathan put the card back in his shirt pocket. After that he read it every morning in the bathroom, before he shaved, to a face that was only half covered in soap. The donkey in the mirror, he decided, was the only audience it was ever meant for.