My aunt, Mary Beton, i must tell you, died by a fall from her horse when she was riding out to take the air in Bombay.
The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the Act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor's letter fell into the postbox and when i opened it i found that she had left me £500 a year forever.
Of the two — the vote and the money — the money, i own, seemed infinitely the more important. Before that i had made my living by cadging odd jobs... i need not, i am afraid, describe in any detail the hardness of the work, for you know perhaps women who have done it... But what still remains with me... is the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me.
To begin with, always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave... and then the thought of that one gift which it was death to hide — a small one but dear to the possessor, perishing and with it my self, my soul, — all this became like a rust eating away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart....It is remarkable... what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
No force in the world can take from me my £500. Food, house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore, not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness... So imperceptibly i found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.
They too, the patriarchs... had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great.
True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harboring in their breasts a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs — the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children's lives... Watch in the spring sunshine the stock-broker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money when it is a fact that £500 a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.
These are unpleasant instincts to harbor, i reflected. They are bred of the conditions of life; of the lack of civilization, i thought... by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves.
That building, for example, do i like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.
Excerpted from The Daily Times, Karachi.