It is from that day that people said, ‘Take care when you go to Sankar; he will never take a false case.’ And he took but the lowest fee, and when the clients were poor he said to his clerk, ‘Make an affidavit for Suranna’s Dasanna. Stamps, private account, please,’ and people began to come to him more and more and never was there a man in Karwar that had risen so quickly in public esteem and legal success as he. But he never bought a car and never dressed in hat and shoes and suit, and always smiled at everyone. And when the court was over he did not go like Barrister Sastri and Advocate Ramrao to the Bar Club to have whisky-and-soda and God knows what, but he went straight to the floor above the khadi shop, where the new Hindi teacher Surya Menon held classes, and when Sankar had time he divided the class into two and gave a lesson to the latecomers. He said Hindi would be the national language of India, and though Kannada is good enough for our province, Hindi must become the national tongue, and whenever he met a man in the street, he did not say ‘How are you?’ in Kannada, but took to the northern manner and said ‘Ram-Ram.’ But what was shameful was the way he began to talk Hindi to his mother, who understood not a word of it, but he said she would learn it one day; and he spoke nothing but Hindi to his daughter, and if by chance he used an English word, as they do in the city, he had a little closed pot, with a slit in the lid, into which he dropped a coin, and every month he opened it and gave it to the Congress fund. And if any of his friends should utter an English word in his house, he would say, ‘Drop me a coin,’ and the friends got angry and called him a fanatic; but he said there must be a few fanatics to wash the wheel of law, and he would force his friends to drop the coin and if they refused he dropped one himself.
And he was a fanatic, too, in his dress, you know, sister. When he went to a marriage party he used to say, ‘Everyone must be in khadi or I will not go,’ and they said, ‘Oh, one must have a nice Dharmawar sari for the bride; she cannot look like a street sweeper,’ and he would say, ‘Well, have your Dharmawar saris and send your money to Italian yarn makers and German colour manufacturers and let our Pariahs and peasants starve,’ and when they pleaded, ‘Just one Dharmawar sari?’ he would say, ‘I am not the head of the family, but if you wear anything but khadi I will not go!’ And that is how nobody in their house nor in their cousin’s house had any new Dharmawar saris, and when they went for any kumkum and haldi invitation, they put on their old saris and slipped out through the back door. And he also made the whole family fast — fast on this day because it is the anniversary of the day the Mahatma was imprisoned, fast on that day for the Jallianwalabagh massacre, and on another day in memory of the day of Tilak’s death, and some day he would have made everyone fast for every cough and sneeze of the Mahatma. ‘Fasting is good for the mind,’ he would say, and even on the days he fasted he was in full spirits and went to court and spun his three hundred yards of yarn every morning instead of his prayers, and he said the gods would be happy when the hungry stomachs had food.
But what a good expression he had on his face, sister! He looked a veritable Dharmaraja. And Rangamma told us never a man smiled more and sang more at home than he, and he was always the earliest to rise and the last to go to bed, yet he was always in the best of health. ‘Lemon water and gymnastics, gymnastics and lemon water, can keep the plague at the doorstep,’ he used to say, and to tell you the truth, never had Rangamma looked so healthy and serene as she did then. She was nearing forty, but she looked hardly thirty-three, and there was not a grey hair on her head. And she would work, too, then, she could talk and write and hold classes and sometimes she even went, they said, to meetings with Sankar. And once Sankar had asked her to say a few words about Moorthy, and she had stood up and spoken of Moorthy the good, Moorthy the religious, and Moorthy the noble, and she had found no more words, and she had come down from the platform and had begun to shiver and tears had come into her eyes. But she said that was the first time, but if she had ever to speak again she would have no such fears, and of course we knew she was a tight-jawed person and she could speak like a man.