on many nights he had watched boys of his own age boxing, doing barbell exercises, or jumping ropes. He had often wished he might join them, but the membership fee was fantastic in contrast with the little money he was getting at the mill. That was one of the things these speakers in the park had been talking about. In the U.S.S.R., said one man who had been there, free parks of "Rest and Culture" had been made available to all workers, and boys his age could play games as well as practice physical exercises.
One night soon after he had come to Calcutta two years before, Nihar had gone to a boxing match with Prabhu, a Hindu at the mill, and he had been tempted to go back again just to be with the boys and to feel some sense of belonging. This sports club was supported by a wealthy Hindu gentleman, and it was named after him. Prabhu was an enthusiastic member, and he had invited Nihar to go again. But Nihar was a Christian, and he had always meant to look around to see if the Christians had any such clubs. The drudgery of the mill and the routine of his life, however, had made him apathetic and lacking in initiative.
Shortly after the boxing match, another boy had invited him to a Communist meeting, and after that, he had been absorbed night after night by the processions, the meetings, and the general excitement that made Calcutta continuously fascinating and made him forget the loneliness that had haunted him since he first came to the city. Never had Nihar experienced such excitement as he had seen in Cal- cutta just before this election. Today would end this excitement. He had dreaded to have this happen, for he knew of nothing that would take its place. The park this morning already had the atmosphere of the day after a picnic.
Where there had been units of men in the park and in the street, there suddenly seemed to be one great, moving throng. Pressing forward toward a house, as if by the forces of motion, like the force of a wave dashing against a rocky shore, this sea of white-dhotied and white-trousered men surged forward. These men were a curious lot. Their rive glances backward, their self-conscious laughs, their incessant loud talking these were all evidence of rain, evidence that they had been caught in a movement and were suddenly being carried on with it, the individual unable to comprehend just what it all meant or where he was going.
A few had known. The cries and the slogans they shouted were taken up by the others until the whole mass was yelling, pushing mob, yelling because those in front yelled, pushing because a house stood directly in front of them as an objective. A mob formed so suddenly that no concerted, directed effort could have been responsible, a mob created spontaneously out of the masses of men in a crowded Indian city where individuals and groups breathe an air of ex- pectancy polluted by disappointment and where forced leisure gives any incentive for attention a focus that soon develops men into a crowd.
This was not a mob of thousands of Communists, as the papers had reported, charging onto the home of the Chief Minister of the State who was the leader of the Congress Party. It was a mob of miscellaneous men suddenly gal- vanized into a mass made up of individuals who neither knew its reason for existence nor the attraction of B. C. Roy's house toward which it pressed. A mob made up of men who had time to be a mob because they had nothing
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