THE GLASS MANSION

(A Fantasy)

“BUTCH I BABU”

Rendered from Telugu original by the Author

At last my dream has been realised; after years of toil the glass mansion has been completed and is now ready for my occupation. Great architects and sculptors had prepared the plan and design of the mansion. To name only a few–they were the Greek sculptors Paraxiteles, Phidias, Gudea the Chaldean Prince, Trajan who once worked on the panels and friezes of the Asian King Ashrubanipal’s Palace and Hadrian the Roman King who erected the Roman Wall. In the beginning, there was the usual clash of opinion among the experts. The builders of Harappa and the Tanjore Temple architects had suggested that the mansion should be cast in ivory; while the Ellora sculptors backed by the Amaravati school had pointed out that ivory pales with time, besides the possibility of its use, provoking a rebellion by the Big Game hunters who would be faced with a shortage a elephants. It was finally decided that my mansion should be made of glass. And the work of digging out for glass half the earth of Asia and Europe had begun. Although there was little need for it, Giotto and Senorelli had laid out the foundations. The side walls were the work of the German architect Gropius; Donatello completed the doors; the ceiling was of course entrusted to Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci.

The carvings and paintings of the central hall were done by the Japanese artist Utamaro, Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren and Edward Lutyens, the architect of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, had completed the first, second and top floors of the mansion respectively. The Spiral staircase stands a lasting monument to the genius of that rogue Cellini. A dance hall also was designed on the principles laid down by Bharata Muni. Lastly, the single pillared tower for contemplation was put up by those anonymous workmen who laboured earlier on the Taj Mahal. Chandrabushan the leader of the labourers who erected the Ramappa Temple, was exclusively responsible for the freizes, frescoes and panels of the tower, with the Southsea Island dancers done in the nude by Gauguin occupying the central pedestal. I told them, it is impossible for me to sit in the middle of these tantalising beauties in stone and contemplate the cosmos. I demanded that a further tower of solitude be put up cut off from the crowded medley of female forms. There was an uproar. They told me no enjoyment is possible to the solitary and that I need somebody for companionship and for sharing of aesthetic delights. “Anyway what’s the big idea of the glass mansion?” they demanded.

‘Oh, I am tired of this life–with its sickness, wickedness war, old age and death. I like to get away from all this noise, turmoil and tension……’ I said, somewhat peeved.

‘Ah! you are the man wanting to get away from Men, are you?’ retorted Rousseau.

‘Yes. One should get away from the crowd and seek a quiet retreat, and after spiritual refreshment should come back to face the grim task of living with an awakened vision. Look at Christ, at Muhammad, Sankara, the Buddha and Tyagaraja. Look at Ramana. They all had run away to silence and solitude. What is wrong if I do the same?’ I queried.

There was a derisive chuckle from Confucius. ‘Did the Buddha conquer death? Could he stay the onset of disease and old age?” ‘No Sir, the Buddha wanted to remain forever beautiful, young and vigorous and he went out in search of an elixir that would procure for him immortal beauty and youth and he failed–failed miserably–and shall I say it?–His very failure grown into a cult–a religion. Ah! the religion of the fellows who are doomed to grow old and die?’

I heard a soft voice but assertive and emphatic in manner. It was Bernard Shaw’s. “That was not the trouble. You see, Buddha promised them eternal youth and beauty provided they willed it strongly–with all the might of their being. If, after the Buddha’s passing, a million of his disciples had fervently willed and passionately desired it, they would surely have got it. Instead, they spent their time in living up to an impossible code, the first tenet of which enjoined a clean shaven head and a saffron robe. They thought beauty can be attained by making themselves ugly.”

In approval of this peroration there were claps from Darwin and Bergson.

This was getting away from the main argument which is that I should possess beauty, art and culture not accessible to the common run of mankind. I cannot appreciate what everybody raves about. I want something denied to the mob, beyond the reach of what Priestly calls the ‘Admass’. I told them in my own groping manner.’

‘Then these thoughts, these paths would surely lead you to Hell’ said Dante.

‘Then to Hell I wend my way’. I said, ‘Look at our ancestors. In those days when a man wrote a book, it became a classic and founded a religion. Look at Valmiki–and yourself, Dante. Look at Omar, Milton and Kant. They needed hundreds of commentators, critics and disciples to expound, expose, confute and refute, enlarge and amplify and what not. But today–What do you see? A book should be simply written–easily understood by the average man and admired by the pan-wallahs, rickshaw-wallahs, and the old woman who makes cakes out of cow dung. If it is dance it has to be screened and applauded by millions. All painting should have utilitarian appeal and commercial values. Art to-day demands everything excepting, of course, culture, experience, scholarship, imagination, discipline and vision. That is why, I wish to get away into solitude and light the creative flame and fan it with individual breath, each ray shedding the spiritual light, each flicker flashing the unique sublimity. Hence the Glass Mansion’.

There was applause from Goethe, Homer and Tolstoy. Only Wordsworth and Vemana demurred–I don’t know why. My harangue has had some effect and the tower of solitude was completed. For this I am indebted to Correggio, Tiepolo, Rubens and Bernini. Other minor enchantments of the mansion could be briefly acknowledged. The dining hall was the work of Eric Gill–the portico and Balcony of Aristide Malliol. Malliol of course was as authority on the nude. I don’t know why he was so keen on carving nudes while in fact there were any number of flesh and blood beauties. Even so, I did not have the heart to damp his enthusiasm and let him complete the carvings. And then the bed-room. I am convinced that Rodin is the man for it. He can present not merely the spirit and tone of a vision but the very bones–its skeleton as it were. It was a wonderful bed-room that Rodin had turned out. Its angularities, corners and edges were finely grained and merged into the fantastic. It was Rodin gone mad. Fine work, I complimented him. “But where is the bed?” I asked.

Rodin laughed, and his laughter was weird and explosive. “The bed? Oh no. There should be no bed. The bed is the bane of all bed-rooms–don’t you know? In any case you are out for enjoyment–entertainment and not for dozing off.”

“But this is ridiculous.”

“Look here,” I told Rodin, “Enjoyment is only approximation to an ideal, an inward vision. It doesn’t mean I should starve and die of lack of food and sleep. Food and sleep are the fundamentals of life–in fact they are the pillars of the bedstead. So start work on it.”

“Take it easy. All right. It will be done,” said he.

And the bed was ready a year after.

“Where is the bed?” I asked looking round bewildered.

“Here it is” said Rodin. There were only four pillars of the cot–each carved in the image of a headless woman; one of them lacked the breasts, another lacked buttocks, a third lacked feet and the fourth one was without hands.

“What is all this?” I asked.

“Ah~ these are the fundamentals of humanity–the pillars of life–of food and sleep–of sex and soul” replied Rodin and walked away laughing to himself like a mad man.

Bewildered I asked Croce to comment on Rodin’s verbal antics.

“It is very simple” said that philosopher of aesthetics “man cannot endure perfection.” Complete Goodness and perfection of Beauty remain Divine attributes. Look at the ancient temples with their fantastic carvings. Did you ever come across an idol or an image which remained intact–which man has not disfigured? Where are the hands of Venus of Milo? What happened to the nipple of the mother feeding her child carved on the Khajuraho Temple? The black princess in the Ajanta fresco has a distorted leg. No. Man cannot tolerate intolerable beauty. Hence he takes pleasure in destroying the final grace–the last perfection.”

While I was pondering this explanation I noticed the historian Gibbon shaking his head in disapproval and muttering something. He took me aside and told me that all this is bunkum. “A great civilisation comes up only in the wake of perfection–perfection of thought and deed, of beauty and character intuitively apprehended and inspired by creative fire. The Greek and Roman civilisations are examples of this process. With the spread of Christianity, the natural creative impulses had been checked and atrophied and man eschewing concern for here and now began to be worried about life after death–when once this process begins, a civilisation declines. Look at the fall of the Roman Empire!” he concluded.

I generally dread any controversy about religious matters and was wondering what to say to Gibbon’s comment. Fortunately the historian Spengler came to my rescue.

“The moment a civilisation attains perfection it begins to crumble and collapse. Just as man obeys the law of the cycle of life which is birth, growth and death, civilisations also obey a certain law in accordance with which they reach a summit and finally break down. It is an irrevocable chain and it has nothing to do with the ideals of Beauty and perfection.”

There was a chorus of praise for Spengler’s thesis and my proclivities were encouraged by Voltaire, King Solomon, and Walt Whitman who said that man should freely indulge his natural impulses unchecked by primitive taboos.

Paxton took charge of the work and brought huge quantities of glass from all over the World. But where are the workmen?

I heard several voices at once.

“You are our heir; we made you, we will give you all workmen you need” said these voices and they belonged to Hammurabi, Hannibal, Nebuchadnazzar, Charlemagne, Din Ilahi, Hyksos the Egyptian King, Akbar, Timur, Chengiz Khan and Urenger the Sumer Lord. They kept at my disposal thousands of their workmen. Measurements and surveying were taken up Lycurgus and Kautilya, supervised of course by Kalidasa and Marcus Aurelius.

No slackness on the part of labourers was permitted because the target date was set by none other than Nanaphadnavis, Seneca and Savanarola. At times when some misplacements occurred, Muhammed-bin-Tughlak and Paparaya of Bobbili saw to it that the whole thing was done over again. The workmen sweated profusely and their sweat ran into a thin stream.

‘The sweat of men has the aroma of a faded rose,’ so sang Omar Khayyam. Handel, Beethoven and Tansen, entertained the workers with their music and he1ped to revive their jaded spirits. ‘Nefertiti’ the beautiful queen and wife of ‘Iknatis’ mother of six children had even offered to dance for their entertainment.

These armies of workmen laboured at the mansion, for weeks and months. Their bodies shone as glass; their strength broke up into radium, split up into Neutron, Positron and Cyclotron and formed into a chain reaction, their lifeblood transformed into Cornice, Pagoda and Arch: their awareness and historic consciousness each wrought into a column, and at last my glass mansion was completed. I was thinking of a tip.

“We don’t want anything in return. This is our wealth and you inherit it.” So saying the workmen slowly departed. I was touched by their generosity and felt grateful to them. There was of course a touch of condescension in my gratitude. They might have cut a figure in their own day–these mighty monarchs–each of them was perhaps a representative of his time, a historic personality. Even so, to me they appeared small, droll and insignificant. For these were chained to the rock of historicity and could not glimpse beyond their environment; the consciousness of each generation was limited by its time and I, living in the modern age and enjoying the benefits of science and technology, naturally felt superior to them. They were the slaves of a past small, confined and squatting in front of a cave whose entrance was closed to them forever, to borrow an image from Plato.

As though they read my thoughts, some of the workmen, I suspected, turned round for a moment and laughed out–was there a trace of mockery in it?

I did not know, and I did not care, for my gaze was fixed on the mansion. It was taller than the Eiffel tower, than the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ at Versailles.

“Where shall we keep it?” Someone asked.

“Up in the sky, higher up–beyond the reach of those on earth “ I said. And so they left the mansion high above the earth. I could see the circular edge of the earth, here and there a tiny peak of a mountain. The hamlets huddled together in each other’s shadow and a vast expanse of water; ageless, timeless, the waves of the sea rolled on the shore and retreated into the heaving bosom, baffled in their search for security–for the final mystery lay beyond their ken like the pearl inside the oyster.

Soon I felt bored with watching the waves at play and stepped inside the hall. All around was glass and I saw my image reflected in a thousand places, each corner and angle throwing back a distorted image. There my brow has been elongated, here my chin flattened; there a pinched cheek; here a sagged neck–in between flew arrows of light in all the colours of a rainbow. Everywhere there was colour and beauty–only my image remained ugly. But I should get out and see its enchanting beauty from outside. Alas! there was no outside and I dared not step out.

That demure dark beauty Molla was willing to recite passages from her classic The Ramayana. As she sat there I could see reflected in every piece of glass–her huge rounded breasts like a thousand hillocks magnified and distorted; oh! it was a terrifying maze of beauty. Panting for breath I went up and stepped on the balcony. Rangajamma was ready for a dance.

Muthuswamy Dikshitar came forward with a tambur. Napolean offered to arrange a parade of his soldiers–those that remained after his retreat from Moscow. Berlioz was waiting for my signal to start his orchestra. Paul Cezanee had set up his easel to draw my portrait, reducing my features to mathematical forms. The musician Narayanadas was getting ready to recite a Harikatha; Saigal was clearing his throat; Sreenadha had started to tell me of his strange encounter with the temple dancer. A number of writers–Errapragada, Muddupalani (what a beautiful she has!), La Rochefocauld (to pronounce his name is a sure cure for tooth ache!), Tchaikowisky, Chilakamarti, Lawrence and Syama Sastry–came forward to sing and read out to me passages from their works.

Socrates stepped forward. “Where is the audience?” he asked.

After a moment’s knitting of eyebrows I said, “I am the audience.”

“There can be no art without audience,” said Socrates.

“Look here. I don’t like all this. There are so many of you, writers, musicians and dancers. You are also part of the audience. Aren’t you?”

He laughed dryly.

“No, they are all artists all right. You know, an artist is jealous of another artist; one school envies another school. Art cannot have an audience of artists. These should be lay people like me and you…..”

This was exasperating.

“So what?” I shouted.

“The only way out would be to get back to the earth–and from there assemble an audience.”

This was not a bad idea. I told them to take my mansion nearer to the earth.

“That is impossible” said a voice. I turned round and saw Einstein.

“What?”

“I repeat it is impossible. Rather you should try to bring up the earth nearer to your mansion,” he said.

“How is that?”

“Don’t you know, I advised your architect, to put into the glass of your mansion some magnetic zones sufficiently strong to defy and overcome the gravitational pull of the earth and sufficiently weak not to be attracted by the gravitational field of the nearest planet. Otherwise, your mansion would collapse on the earth and crumble to pieces,” he explained.

“But how can I get the earth nearer to the mansion? “I asked.

“Very simple. You have to reduce the intensity of the gravitational zone in your mansion” was Einstein’s suggestion.

I was not interested in technicalities and told them to set about it soon.

“How long is it going to take?” I asked by way of an after-thought.

“Your question should be ‘how long will it take to according to my clock’ if you have one of course–”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, your ignorance is monumental. Don’t you know this much?” began James Jeans.

Light travels at the speed of one lakh eighty-six thousand miles per second. Now look at that star. The universe is so large and that star is so far away that light takes nearly two thousand years to travel from it to your earth. If according to your clock you go to that star and from there observe the goings on the earth, you would see this here; Socrates gulping down the poison at the end of his trial; you would see Plato; Gautamiputra Satakarni, your Andhra King; even Surpanakha, the wily sister of Ravana. You seem to be under the delusion that all these V. I. Ps had come to you. No. You had gone to them and met them in what may be called the fourth dimension–the space-time continuum. As you go upwards in space, you will see the film of time rolled up by history, unfolding; you will begin to see the murder of Caesar, the sack of Rome, and the fall of the Vijayanagar Empire. What does it mean? Time is without past or future; time has only the present in relation to the observer chained to space; both these concepts of space and time are purely terrestrial improvisations.”

“I only suggested you to bring down the mansion and you treat me to a timeless lecture,” I chaffed.

“All right, but where shall We leave it?”

“Wherever there is room for it.”

“I cannot see any room for it” said Lenin.

“Look at the earth, yourself.” I surveyed the scene. There were no open spaces–everywhere I saw cities, bridges and factories.

I know for certain Saravayya, the Karanam of my village, has two acres of land, adjoining my own plot of an acre. I told them to erect a pillar in my own field–a pillar to support the glass mansion.

“There again you are babbling,” said Whitehead. “According to terrestrial time the people on earth had lived through forty years; they had completed six or seven Five-year Plans, they reclaimed and renovated fallow land, built townships, augmented their agricultural resources and are a happy contented race. Of course, saravayya, the Karanam, died ten years ago.”

“Are you telling me there is no place for my mansion?” I asked in a tone of despair.

It was Lincoln who came to my rescue. He had arranged the erection of two pillars on which the mansion was supported–sufficiently high above the earth and sufficiently near to enable the denizens of the earth to come up to my mansion by a ladder.

The ladder was put up by Benjamin Franklin–a lover of kite flying.

Now I was satisfied for I could see the earth below and at the same time I remained aloof and alone–just what I wanted. Now I was ready for untramelled indulgence of a life of Art. 1 called the entertainers and they came. Mary Pickford, Pavlova and Anarkali–one by one they had begun to dance and, unable to wait till the other had finished, they all started dancing and I was dazed by the sight of those forms mirrored in glass which threw back hundreds of reflections–of arms moving in circles, of buttocks and breasts shot out and withdrawn, of lips pursed and parted, of eyes that shone with mist and rainbow lights, of necks twisted, of shoulders and legs turned and intertwined–I lost myself in a world of ecstatic Phantasmagoria, like an electron bereft of its nucleus, like a circle devoid of its circumference, a triangle without its angles.

These Bacchanalian revelries were interrupted by weird, muffled sounds and shouts from below. I looked through the glass and saw a large crowd of men and women jeering and shouting. That is the rub with these glass mansions. I told myself that I ought to have thought of it before–namely that glass, silvered or not, shows up or shows through. Now there could be no privacy and solitude, no meditation. I ordered Shivaji to find out what the crowd wanted and if possible to silence it. He took Ranjit Singh as his companion and in a short while both returned and reported the facts. It would appear that the men on earth were engaged in their usual occupations and if they looked up it was only to satisfy themselves that no eclipse was in progress.

“Don’t you know, people nowadays seldom look at the moon. They do so only when the moon is in eclipse and of course, on such an occasion, the moon is invisible.” This was the dramatist Vedam Venkataraya Sastri. Even so I was vaguely frightened with the behaviour of the crowd.

“It is as it should be” began Sigmund Freud “your life is chain of fears. All your attempts at attainment of beatitude through art and beauty is simply an escape from the realm of fear. I tell you what. Your mother had become ill after your birth and you were deprived of her breast feed; instead you were fed by a servant woman. That woman was deserted by her lover and out of that frustration you were fed and fondled. The result is you had inherited all those fears, frustration and melancholia. It is time you became aware of the unconscious forces lurking inside your libido and faced the truth about yourself–and gave up all this aesthetic tomfoolery.”

This was an annoying analysis and I rebuked Freud thus:

“The philosophy you had cultivated could also result from some childhood maladjustment, some wet bed complex–and as such need have no validity.”

Adler clapped his hands in token of approbation.

I told them my requirements. I should be able to see through the glass all around but those outside should not see me.

Newton readily volunteered to undertake the task. The required chemicals, he told me, were available in plenty inside the earth below. Only thousands of workmen would be needed to dig out the earth and procure the material. I gave the word that it should be done. Alexander presently sent in his armies. The builders of Angkorwat, of Kutb Minar and the Great Wall of China stood in readiness. They were willing to do anything, provided the earth is brought to them; only they themselves would not dream of going back to earth.

This was preposterous.

“What is the way out?” I yelled. Then Veeresalingam Pantulu sensibly suggested that I had better engage the workmen from the earth below. I thought it a brilliant suggestion and said so.

No doubt, it is brilliant” cut in Karl Marx “but there is a snag in it. These labourers demand wages. Also they would not undertake to execute a project designed to foster idleness, luxury and the vagaries of the rich–in short anything that smacks of bourgeoise enterprise. You have no doubt at your disposal all the resources of history, of wealth hoarded by generations of your predecessors and so can command and exploit them. Yes, they will come and work for you. But beware, soon they foment rebellion and one day in a frenzy of hate wrought by hunger and servitude will set about destroying your mansion!”

“Leisure is the backbone of culture. Look at the men and women below toiling like ants–look at that stream of trains, carts, automobiles, those rows of factories emitting putrid smoke–all this work and incessant striving is aimed at one thing, i.e., to secure more leisure which could be utilised for the cultivation and enjoyment of the fine arts which is the ultimate glory of any civilisation. Therefore, I implore you to continue your revelries, your adoration of thin-lipped matrons and wide-hipped dancers.”

The speaker was Oscar Wilde, concealed behind the burly figure of William Morris.

“The so-called indulgence of the arts as a tribute to civilisation is a myth invented by the rich to hoodwink the poor. All enterprise is inspired by hunger, not leisure” was the heated retort of Engels.

Fortunately for me, a majority had voted for a life of art and it was decided that some chemical should be introduced into the glass by which one could see from inside unseen by those outside. There was a more serious objection to this from Gandhi. He decried the very concept of privacy. The consequences of any act that I do in private, he said in cool and persuasive tones, will have to be shared by everybody else and moral responsibility is therefore collective. Instead, he suggested, let all the workmen join hands and work together eschewing notions of personal advantage. If they worked in a competitive, acquisitive spirit, all of us should observe a fast to bring about a change in their mental climate.

“Only an ill-fed crowd could afford a fast” observed Shaw.

“Yes. If one well-fed man went on a single fast, dozens of men could be treated to a feast” replied Sriramulu amidst a thunderous applause.

I agreed to this arrangement.

Now the time had come when I could resume the pursuit of the fine arts. With Hariprasada Rao and Sarah Bernhardt cast in the roles of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, they staged a play. Then came the drama “Sakkubai” with Tungala Chalapati Rao as ‘Sakku’ and James Boswell as her husband; Baudelaire and Tenali Rama recited some obscene verses; Aesop told us some fairy tales. I don’t know if I dozed off, fatigued by ecstasy but I was rudely awakened by the wily hairsplitting Socrates.

“Where is the audience?”

“Look here–what is all about an audience when I am lost in pure enjoyment?”

“No, you are not enjoying anything, you are only dreaming. What you are actually experiencing is the smell of Coal Tar or Neon gas, chloroform and iodine from the factories and hospitals on the earth below.”

I soon realised that this was a fact. These are nasty smells and sights from the earth. The soot and smoke from the chimneys is blinding my eyes. Let us put a stop to it, I yelled.

“It will be done” said Tippu Sultan. After a few minutes he returned to say that the people on earth are not inclined to put a stop to their activities.

“Let us go and stop them by force,” said Bhagat Singh.

“War is the weapon of the spiritual bankrupt. Peace alone can save the situation. Let us shift the mansion to a different spot,” said Asoka.

I have nothing against this but I was intrigued by his use of the words “we” and “us”. It looks as though all these high personages are going to reside permanently in my mansion depriving me of privacy and solitude–the very negation of all that is dear to me. I lost my head and, having worked myself up into a wrathful mood, told all those present to get out.

Suddenly there was an outburst of hysteric screams and bizarre laughter and I felt the glass mansion swaying this side and that.

Vatsayana came running and delivered the message.

“The men and women on the earth–as though they had gained vigour and strength by observing the principles of rejuvenation which I explained in my ‘Kamasutra’ had begun to shake the mansion.”

“Why? What do they want?”

“They say they have planned to construct a theatre there and these two pillars supporting the mansion are in the way. They desire its urgent removal.”

“Then do arrange for the removal of the mansion to another spot” I said.

I heard the sound of broken glass. Somebody, had thrown tone a stone at the mansion and the glass was falling. Then another stone; then a third. A volley of stones had shattered a part of the glass flooring.

“They do this out of envy–these men” said Gurazada Apparao.

“They envy you as much as you envy them.” This was a new voice and I turned aside to see whose it was.

He is Shakespeare and he began talking without giving me a chance to reply.

“You do things in a half-hearted way. You desire friendship, yet cannot endure the company of man; you hunger for love, yet you are not content with your lover. You have passion but cannot divert it to any object; you shed tears out of a joyous eye; you seek an embrace with hands clasped at the back; you strive for nothing and yet want to possess everything. Yes. Your glass mansion is a lasting symbol of your ego, your narrowness, your perverted passion and distorted emotion; a tragic monument to a tragic existence. And rightly it has a tragic end.”

More and more stones are striking the glass walls and there was a general stampede. Out of the holes, a thick stream of smoke and soot started polluting the atmosphere. My breathing was becoming difficult.

“Let me get out of here” I cried. “Let me go and live amidst my men on the earth below.”

I heard Einstein’s voice again.

“No. I am sorry. You cannot get back to your people.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you see! According to the earth’s calendar your mansion was completed forty years ago. At its commencement your age was forty-five. What does it mean?”

I was vaguely alarmed with this news but didn’t know how to put it. “The trouble is you don’t learn mathematics. It means you were dead eight years ago, your longevity being limited to seventy-seven.”

This was horrid news and I started weeping.

“Don’t cry. You are happily a dead person. Why cry! One would expect some change in you at least after death. No. You persist in your old emotions and continue the old vagaries. Don’t be childish. Dry your tears. This lesson you learn. Whatever you are bent on achieving should be achieved only when you are alive and not when you are dead.”

I had realised that my bodily existence had come to a close.

“Your life has terminated according to men’s calendar but to those observers in another star in the cosmos you are still alive. In fact to an observer in Aldebaran you are not even born,” said Whitehead consoling me.

“And I have no place to exist in this endless cosmos.”

“The universe is not endless. It is finite. If you start from here, one day you will come back here. Space is curved. The ant goes round and round the orange and thinks the orange is endless. You are no better than the ant.”

I Was not consoled. On the contrary, I was enraged. A fiendish hate, a devilish wrath seized me. I took up a stone and hurled it across the glass ceiling. It would break and the splinters would fall on the heads of men below and destroy them.

“Why don’t you love people even when you are dead? In life, alike in death, you are ruled only by fear and hate. You think these pieces of glass would fall on the earth? No. That would not happen” said Newton.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I had put some chemicals into the glass which defy the earth’s gravitational pull but which would be attracted to another nearer planet. These splinters would fly upward to another body.”

“What? Then what would happen to me?”

“There is no more of ‘you’. Whatever is left of ‘you’ will keep journeying like the splinters of glass–round and round the curved space. That is all.”

This was enough. I ran forward and picking up a huge stone hurled it against the tower of solitude. Unfortunately it hit the head of Ravi Varma who was seated there painting a picture. This enraged him and he threw the canvas board, the brushes and the bottles at me by way of retaliation.

“The owner of the mansion for whom we had toiled days and nights turns out to be an ordinary man–whose chief attribute seems to be ingratitude. He is harming his benefactors. We shall not keep quiet. We shall show him our might.” That was Srinivasa Sastry, rousing his compatriots to action.

His fiery oration was taken up by Surendranath Banerjee and Demosthenese whose speeches electrified the spectators and they began to act. They went about destroying the Pyramids, the palaces at Harappa, the Wall of China and with that material they set about destroying my glass mansion. They were assisted in the destructive task by the men from the earth below. From all sides were hurled in a continuous volley spears, lances, arrows, crow bars, iron rods and Atom Bombs. There was a shattering, deafening sound and the mansion was crumbling to pieces. It was a thunderous noise–as though bangles had broken on the hands of a million women caught in the embrace of alien arms–as though millions of oysters had split and cast out pearls–as though the world’s dead dictators had rattled their angry teeth, alas, as though the hearts of a million saints who hid inside a cave unmindful of the divine call had suddenly broken. Thus the glass mansion was wiped out of existence.

It was the tea cup that had broken into a dozen pieces. It was just luck that at the time of the disaster my wife was taking her morning bath. I quickly picked up the broken pieces of China, wrapped them in an old newspaper and threw the lot–the broken tea cup and the battered Glass Mansion thoughtfully–into the dust-bin provided by the municipality for dust and day dreams.

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