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Previously, Arun had burst into a self-indicting but also self- pitying rant:
Whatever I do, I will not be forgiven. ... I am a great scoundrel, ras-
cal, motherfucker, ... I beat her, with these very hands I beat her up. I
beat Jyoti. I make her suffer. I behave worse than an animal. ... Jyoti,
you are not destined for me, ... After all, scavengers like us are con-
demned to rot in shit. But Jyoti, I loved you from the heart...With
these hands I hurt you ... I must break them, throw these fucking
hands away... (p 42).
At another point, he laments: 'we drink and beat our wives...we make love to them...but the beating is what gets publicized' (p 44). But the audience does not actually witness any such tenderness, so it can dismiss Arun's words as insin- cere or merely self-exculpatory.
On the other hand, the contradictions of the Devalikar family receive extended attention. Nath's miserable predicament is his inability to budge from positions he imagines to be politi- cally just and thus historically redemptive. When he fears that Jyoti may leave Arun, he tells his wife: 'We must save this marriage. Not necessarily for our Jyoti's sake...This is not just a question of our daughter's life, Seva, this has ... a far wider significance ... this experiment is a very precious experiment' (p 41). Even as we see how his mechanical approach ignores the flesh and blood Jyoti, who has become, for Nath, as for Arun, simply a medium for enacting his political faith, we also see his love for his daughter, his anguish at her misery, his frustration at being unable to help her. Although he has be- come increasingly disturbed, and even angered, by evidence of Arun's brutishness, Nath still struggles to 'respect him'.
The turning point comes immediately when Arun forces Nath to make a public speech in praise of his book. If Nath doesn't, Arun taunts him, he will be labelled a casteist, and it will be said that Jyoti was thrown out of the house for marrying a dalit. Seva also fears that Arun will hurt Jyoti if Nath does not cooperate. Nath now feels 'nauseated' by Arun's 'overween- ing arrogance'; he is not only compromised but 'polluted... Seva - you know - you see - I feel like taking a bath, like clean- ing myself! Clean everything! This furniture, this floor ... all this... he has made them filthy, dirty, polluted!' (p 57). His son Jayaprakash had earlier pointed out that Nath's desire for a dalit son-in-law was 'also a kind of casteism' and it is fitting that the erosion of this desire is expressed in the most orthodox of terms. But, whereas Nath's pieties were caricatured in the play, his moment of alienation from Arun arouses great tenderness and protectiveness in his wife, and sympathy from both her and Jayaprakash. Now they repeatedly absolve him of respon- sibility, telling him that, after all, Jyoti made her own decision.
Jyoti's 'decision' is, in fact, the real hinge of the play, one that yokes 'free will' with 'compulsion' and indicts the coercive undercurrents of Nath's reformism. If Arun's persona has been shaped by his upbringing in poverty and deprivation, Jyoti's has been moulded by the rhetoric of liberal reform. She grew up, she says, listening to the articles of reformist faith: 'Hatred, not for the man, but for his tendencies. No man is fundamentally evil, he is good... It is essential to awaken the god slumbering within the man' (p 67), pieties familiar to most Indian audiences through Gandhi's rhetoric. She accuses her father of knowing, but not be- ing able to confront, the emptiness of such platitudes. But she, as a child and then as a young woman, actually believed in them. Only when she lived with Arun did she come to understand that there is no difference between a 'man' and his 'tendency':
Arun is both the beast, and the lover. Arun is the demon. And also the
poet. Both are closely bound together, one within the other, they are
one. So closely bound that at times it is not possible to distinguish the
demon from the poet. Filthy cursing is part of his frenzied love; a sud-
den shower of hard, ardent kisses accompanies the rain of blows. After
going through these miseries, if the broken body finds some rest and
wakes to engage itself in the routine, then, a few lines come to hand,
lines steeped in feeling, fragments of poetry filled with the throb of
pain ... All these things are done by the same person, at the same time!
Tell me, where is that beast I should drag out and destroy, where is
that god I should arouse from his sleep? (p 68).
Whereas her father has the luxury of walking away from Arun, she has been denied that option by the indoctrination of her youth: 'This drug, Bhai, has entered and mingled with our blood. The poison has numbered our entire consciousness. We cannot run away ... [We shall] continue to lose our lives as guinea pigs in the experiment, and you, Bhai, ... you will go on safely rousing the god sleeping in man' (p 69).
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