Krishnaswami woke at half past five every morning, and every morning he woke a slightly different man from the one who had gone to bed.
The man who went to bed was usually reasonable. He had eaten his curd rice, checked that the gas cylinder knob was turned off, and settled under the fan feeling at peace with the world. The man who woke up was another fellow altogether. He woke with a vague grievance and no idea what it was about. The crows outside the window seemed louder than they needed to be. The milk packet the boy had flung over the gate seemed to have been flung with personal malice. And the thought of the office, which last night had been only "the office," now came to him as a long corridor full of people waiting to annoy him.
"You are scowling at the ceiling again," his wife said from the doorway. She had been up since five, as she had been for thirty years, and she said it the way one remarks that it might rain.
"I am not scowling. I am thinking."
"Thinking makes your face look like that? Then think a little less before coffee."
Krishnaswami did not answer. He had recently found in a thin yellow book on yoga philosophy that the chatter of the mind was called *vrtti*. There were five kinds. The first was right knowledge of reality, which he felt he rarely had. The second was false knowledge, which he suspected he had in abundance. Then came imagination, which had no reality at all. That was where the office corridor lived. Then memory, the impressions the senses leave on the mind. And last, surprisingly, sleep.
He had read that line three times. Sleep, a disturbance of the mind? He had always thought sleep was the one time the mind kept quiet. But the book was right, and his ceiling-scowl proved it. The body rested all night like an obedient bullock in its shed, while the mind wandered off on its own, picked up all sorts of rubbish, and brought it home at dawn.
There was also an old Greek, or possibly a Roman, his nephew in Bangalore had been vague on the point, who said that between a thing happening and a man reacting to it there was a small space. In that space sat the man's opinion. The milk packet did not insult him. His opinion of the milk packet insulted him. Krishnaswami had found this very irritating when he first read it, because it took away the pleasure of blaming the milk boy.
So he had started a practice. His wife called it "Appa's morning drama," because he went about it with great seriousness.
After his coffee, which he drank standing at the window because sitting made him sleepy again, he went to the small room that had once been his son's and was now the place where old newspapers waited to be sold to the kabadiwala. There, on a wooden table his father had bought in 1961, he kept three books and a notebook.
The books were Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. He was not sure he understood all of them. Marcus Aurelius seemed to have spent his whole life telling himself not to be annoyed by people, which comforted Krishnaswami a great deal. If an emperor of Rome needed reminding every morning, a Senior Assistant in the accounts section might be forgiven for needing it too.
He read a page or two slowly, moving his lips a little, as he had done as a schoolboy. Then he opened the notebook and wrote down whatever had stuck, in his own words, because copying out the whole thing seemed like cheating. That morning he wrote:
*The day will bring difficult people. This is not news. Do not act surprised.*
He looked at it and felt pleased, as if he had written it himself. In a way he had.
By the time he came out of the room, the man who had scowled at the ceiling had more or less gone away. The crows were only crows. The milk packet was only a milk packet, slightly dented but not wicked. Even the thought of Ramanathan from Establishments, who called every meeting "a small discussion" and then talked for ninety minutes, seemed less of a calamity and more of a weather condition, like the monsoon. You did not argue with the monsoon. You carried an umbrella.
"Finished your tonic?" his wife asked, handing him his tiffin box.
"Tonic is the right word," he said, surprised that she had found it. "The body has its exercise. Why shouldn't the mind? Otherwise it goes slack. It sleeps all night and wakes up full of nonsense."
"Like some people I know."
He let it pass. That too, he noted with satisfaction, was the practice working.
On the bus, a young man trod on his foot and did not apologise. Krishnaswami felt the old heat rise in his chest and the small space open up, just as the Roman had promised. He stood in it for a moment, quite still. Then he moved his foot. It was a small thing. The day went on.
He could not have said he was a changed man. Some mornings the tonic worked and some mornings it barely got past his throat. But day after day, page after page, the notebook filled up. Slowly the false knowledge and the imagination were sent back where they came from, and the day ran with a little less friction. That, he thought, was perhaps all a man of fifty could reasonably ask: not to become a philosopher, only to stop being quarrelsome before nine in the morning.
His wife, for her part, noticed that he scowled at the ceiling a little less. She said nothing about it. She had her own tonic, and it was called patience, and she had been taking it for thirty years without any books at all.