Peter's Principle

He always drank Brandy because that was, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, a drink for the heroes. Then Peter would drive out in his old favorite Land Rover. An outdoors man, only an open road and fresh air gave him a sense of freedom from himself.

Peter was a symptomatic modern man - passionate, young, courageous, blessed with a surplus of nervous energy, yet deeply divided. With a marriage in a shambles, he had tried all modes of dissipation to help him get over his longing for a woman who would lead him out of his loneliness into an endlessly beautiful existence.

He drove twenty miles on the main road and, just short of Umtyngar, swerved to the right out of some dreamy inner certitude and drove another five miles on the gravel track. He would perhaps have gone farther, but for the first hurdle. A pine trunk, with a girth of about six inches in diameter, said: that far the car can go and no more. It was not clear if Peter made the car go over it volitionally. But the car was still moving when he applied the brakes, and he couldn't see where he was going. The headlights had gone off, and so had the engine, and it was dark when the car came to a halt. It wouldn't re-start when he tried the ignition.

Ten O'clock. Along the reaches of the wilderness, a broken down car, and the mind foggy with alcohol! Peter picked up the torchlight from the glove compartment and defiantly walked away with the self-assurance of a person who knew the area like his backyard. A quarter of a mile from the car, a little light emerging from a house showed nasturtiums growing in beds made of old motor tires.

Looking through the open doorway, he saw a wide airy kitchen to the right, and a young girl sitting near the far corner with her back towards him. He knocked, and the girl looked back and sprang to her feet.

"Baleh aiu, Bah?" What is it, Sir - she asked in Khasi, with an expression of hesitation and surprise.

Peter began to explain in his anglicized Khasi who he was, that he had had a car breakdown, that he wanted to know if there was a car mechanic in the village or, failing that, if he could spend the night somewhere without causing any inconvenience to anybody. She told him, in her Khasi brand of English taught by the nuns in rural convents, that she was alone in the house, that there was no car mechanic in the village, and that only her grandmother may be in a position to give a more satisfactory answer to all his questions, that she was at that moment out visiting a sick neighbor and would soon be back.

Then asking him to shong on a kitchen fireside chair, she disappeared upstairs. Peter lit a cigarette and waited. Meanwhile, the alcohol in his head had weakened a bit, and he remembered that there was a fairly good tool and spares kit in the boot of the car. He walked back, checked the car with the help of the torchlight, and figured out that the car had a slightly damaged suspension but would be in a position to move if the electrical problems could be set right. He was surprised that he able to fix and start the car quite easily.

Then he thought that he couldn't possibly drive away without a show of some civility towards the girl. And not the least of his inducements was the whiff of a smell of fresh hay that came forth from her body when she had moved past him while going upstairs. He drove to the girl's house through a lane lined with fuchsia blossoms brilliant in the headlights, swung off the road below the house, accelerated on a rough incline and pulled up to a point where, later, he could turn the vehicle without the risk of pitching into the stream beside the track.