Chapter 2

Jagan goes home at 7.30pm. He passes Truth Printing, and wonders when Nataraj would begin to publish his book on nature Cure and Natural Diet. He wants to talk politics with him, but resists and goes home, thinking that Mali is alone.

As he walks home his mind wanders off, and he sees a vagrant eating off of the leaves used to cover rice packets thrown in the trash by others. He begins to judge him, thinking of how they stain the image of India – and he comes up with solutions such as providing plates for all of India so that people won’t be able to leave rice packet leaves in trash, so that the vagrants won’t be able to feed off of those. Rather than thinking about how to help out the vagrant, he focuses on how to get rid of them.

He arrives at the Statue of Sir Fredrick Lawley and observes Mali with his friends. He is filled with joy and is proud of his height, weight and growth.

He goes home, an ancient house with a triple series of courtyards and corridors. He gazes at the stars. The bathroom was a shack.

Everyday at 5am he wakes up and brushes his teeth with the twig of a margosa tree. He was opposed to using a toothbrush – saying it was made by hair from pig’s tail. Even after nylon was used, he maintained that it had an adverse effect on the enamel. He is obsessed with the properties of Margosa. His wife refused to partake in his crazy health-freak lifestyle. She hated his theories and lived her own life.

He even forbade her to swallow aspirin when she was once in severe pain. She was desperately begging for aspirin, and Jagan was sympathetic of course (the narrator is being sarcastic here), the narrator says, but was convinced that aspirin would not do her any good: so he refused her Aspirin. Jagan momentarily hates her appearance as she is in that state and tries to prevent these thoughts. When Ambika asks her to leave her alone, he asks ‘Why are you disgusted with me.’ He is quite clueless about how he is being inconsiderate.

Jagan finally wants to find the pill for Ambika and doesn’t know where it is: but Mali knows and shows him where to find it.