Shikasta

But her eyes look into the camera, and they are patient and wise.

There is nothing but dust everywhere for miles around. Nearby is a patch of withered sticks which is the millet that was planted for the food for that year. But the drought has killed it all.

The cow has walked until she staggered and subsided to the earth. She will never get up again. She will die here.

The sun is burning down.

The old man has built a little roof to shade her. It is some reeds stretched across four sticks. This gives a little thin shade.

This cow is his friend.

The old man is sitting by the cow. She is in the stripy shade from the reeds, but he is in the full sun. The dust is blowing over them.

There is not enough water for everyone.

The old man has a little water in a tin cup. The cow sometimes pants and her tongue starts lolling out and then he puts some drops of water on the tongue and he swallows a few drops himself.

There they sit. He will sit with the cow until it dies.

The cow knows it is going to die.

The cow thinks that she has belonged to this man and his family all her life. But the wife and the children have died. The cow is wondering why she has to lie here not able to get up, by the old man, and why the dust is everywhere, and there is no rain and no food and no water.

The cow doesn't understand.

The old man doesn't understand. But he says it is The Will of Allah.

I don't think it is The Will of Allah.

I think it is wicked, wicked, and Allah will punish us all for letting the old man die there and his poor cow die in the hot dust.

Why? Oh God!

Why? Oh Allah!

Well, I got back up to the roof with this in my hand, ready to give it to Hasan. He was talking to George and not about to take notice of me. I sat down again.

By then all the sky was full of bright stars, and it was the time when everyone in the little houses was eating. I knew that soon our supper would be ready for us.

Then Olga did call up, Supper.

Hasan finished what he was saying, and got up. He was wearing the usual white robe, and he seemed very tall and a bit shadowy. My heart was aching. It was aching badly. I did not know what to do. I was frantic.

George got to his feet and stood by Hasan. I saw to my surprise that George is very nearly as tall as Hasan.

Both were looking at me while they stood there, tall and shadowy, with the stars all around them.

Hasan smiled. I held out my essay but he did not take it. Of course he didn't. He hadn't asked for it!

So then I said to him, tumbling it all out, I want to do it, I'll do the diary, I want to, really.

Good, was all he said.

And believe it or not, I again was full of resentment, because he hadn't taken my precious essay. And as if he should have congratulated me or made a fuss of me or something for saying I would do this journal.

First I went down the outside of the house on the stairway. Then George behind me. Then Hasan. I was longing for Hasan to come in to supper. He had come several times.

But at the foot of the steps he said goodnight, and George said goodnight and that was that.

Benjamin was not at supper, thank goodness.

That is how I came to write all this.

And now I know why he wanted me to write it.

This bit is being written several weeks later. Nine to be exact.

Two facts. One is, several times I have found myself - I put it like this because it is always by accident apparently, with Hasan and George when they are talking. Or rather Hasan is talking and George listening. At least now I don't emote and grovel inside. I can listen. Sometimes I have just caught the drift of what is being said. But the truth is that I know that after being in on a conversation like this, George has understood one thing and I have understood another. That is the nature of this kind of talk.

The second fact is that George has done something I'd never never have expected not in a thousand years. He has become the leader of a whole gang of boys at the college. They are just as silly and noisy and awful as any of these gangs anywhere. They are always rushing about and making speeches, full of self-importance.

And George is with them.

I think it is awful.

I know that Mother doesn't like it, nor does Father.

As for Benjamin, of course he is having the time of his life, being full of scorn.

But George sees Hasan all the time as well. I don't know what to think.

This is being written later. Months.

George has been to India, to visit Grandfather's family. He is even more grown up, if possible, but he is still boss of that ghastly gang and he is with Hasan more than he is ever with us.

History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. Armies: Various Types of: The Armies of the Young.

"Coming events cast their shadows before." This Shikastan observation was of particular appropriateness during an epoch when the tempo of events was so speeded up. Small harbingers of major social phenomena could be noted, not one or two centuries, but a few years before, sometimes even months. Never was there a time on Shikasta when it was easier to see what was coming; never a time when it could have been so easy for them to understand the simple truth that they were not in control of what was happening to them.

Already in the eighth decade every government on Shikasta was preoccupied, often fearfully and secretively, with the consequences of mass unemployment, and particularly among the young. By then it was evident that the new (and often unforeseen) technologies would make mass unemployment inevitable everywhere, even without the world economic crisis which was due mostly to the spending of the wealth and resources of the planet primarily on wars and the preparations for wars: inevitable even if the population was not increasing at such a rate. (The checks on this increase by deaths due to famines, epidemics, and natural disasters - these last enormously increased due to the cosmic pressures - did not impose a significant effect until later.)

By that time knowledge of mass psychology, crowd control, the psychology of armies, was sophisticated within the limits Shikasta had imposed on itself. [SEE SUBSECTION 3, "The Shifting Criteria and Standards in the Scientifically 'Respectable' and Permitted. Scientific Bigotry Analysed and Compared with Political, and Religious Bigotry in Several Cultures." VOL. 3010, CHAPTER 9, "Results of Secret Research in Military Scientific Establishments and Their Impacts on Civilian and Revealed Science."]

All governments had a pretty clear idea of the dilemmas they faced; and most engaged, to one degree or another, in intensive and permanent discussions with experts on the control of populations.

By the end of the decade no one could be in ignorance as to what must be expected from large numbers of permanently unemployed youth. Already the cities were helpless before the aimless, random, unorganised violence characteristic of small groups of the young, male and female, who "for no reason" destroyed anything they could. The amenities on which the cities of Shikasta were dependent for even an approximation to comfortable living - telephones, transport, parks, public buildings, anything in fact that came into the public domain - might at any moment be destroyed, defaced, or made temporarily inoperative. The cities were no longer safe at night, for these groups of young robbed, assaulted, murdered, always on impulse - and without ill-feeling, almost as a game.

The remedy, an increase in policing - a general increase in militarisation, in fact - was already highlighting the nature of the problem. What is begun has a momentum: the consequences of greater police surveillance, sharper penalties, and the further cramming of prisons already overfull, must be even greater police surveillance and powers, sharper penalties, and a criminal population becoming steadily more brutalised. But these were the begi