WAITING FOR A VISA 675
The inn on the first floor had a small bed-room and adjoining it was one small bath room with a water tap in it. The rest was one big hall. At the time of my stay the big hall was filled up with all sorts of rubbish, planks, benches, broken chairs, etc. In the midst of the surroundings I lived a single solitary individual. The caretaker came up in the morning with a cup of tea. He came again at about 9.30 with my breakfast or morning meal. A third time he came up at about 8.30 in the evening with my dinner. The caretaker came up only when he could not avoid it and on these occasions he never stayed to talk to me. The day was spent somehow.
I was appointed a probationer in the Accountant General’s Office by the Maharaja of Baroda. I used to leave the inn at about 10 a.m. for the office and return late at about 8 in the evening contriving to while away outside the inn as much time in company of friends as I could. The idea of returning to the inn to spend the night therein was most terrifying to me and I used to return to the inn only because I had no other place under the sky to go for rest. In this big hall on the first floor of the inn there were no fellow human beings to talk to. I was quite alone. The whole hall was enveloped in complete darkness. There were no electric lights nor even oil lamps to relieve the darkness. The caretaker used to bring up for my use a small hurricane lamp. Its light could not extend beyond a few inches. I felt that I was in a dungeon and I longed for the company of some human being to talk to. But there was none. In the absence of the company of human beings I sought the company of books and read and read. Absorbed in reading I forgot my lonely condition. But the chirping and flying about of the bats, which had made the hall their home, often distracted my mind and sent cold shivers through me reminding me of what I was endeavouring to forget, that I was in a strange place under strange conditions. Many a time I must have been angry. But I subdued my grief and my anger by the feeling that though it was a dungeon, it was a shelter and that some shelter was better than no shelter. So heart-rending was my condition that when my sister’s son came from Bombay bringing my remaining luggage which I had left behind and when he saw my