Chapter Seventy-Eight
Gangakanta, who had taken to strolling aimlessly about the hotel, chanced upon Gilda. They greeted each other with politeness, and carried on their own way.
Gangakanta admired her renunciation of the flesh, and said so to himself. He watched her shift her heft down the corridor: she had so very much flesh—how could she renounce it all? Her achievement was, he realised, still greater than he’d appreciated. But he had to chastise her for what he saw as an irrational infatuation: namely, her religion. He himself lacked her skeleton with which to maintain a cohesive structure to his ethics. But without that, what, then, did he have? If he lacked the engine of belief—say, a four-handed Vishnu—to keep levitated his ethical juggling balls, he could only, he argued, rely on reason; but reason, citing Newton, could only tell him that those balls could not stay floating up there indefinitely.
Watching Janice, the cleaning lady, thoughtlessly scrub a floor—her mind evidently on other matters, far off from here—he began to wish he had been raised to blindly follow a religion. Then he, too, could march about, praising x and condemning y with as much conviction as the others. His hand, being so steady, would never accidentally write y when he meant x, in so doing overturning millennia-old values. He would not be carrying on this internal soliloquy at all, he said to himself, but would instead, at this moment, probably be chatting amiably about the weather with his mother-in-law whilst she dried the dishes in some distant village.
He returned to his room to meditate.