@@@@@ PART 4 (E) @@@@@
One evening I realised what great cavity he filled in my life. It was after a match we played in a neighbouring town---a difficult match, tense and rough. The crowd had jeered without a pause. Most of all it had jeered me. Every time I led an attack the crowd had spoilt it with its heckling. In the end I had just smashed the shins of a player and got thrown out by the referee. As we cycled home, half a dozen boys ambushed us. Before I knew what was happening I was pinned to the ground. There was blood on my tongue and I was screaming. Then, through the flailing sticks I saw the Brigadier, yelling, laughing, stick in hand, jump into the fray. A first class brawl followed, ended ultimately at the intervention of some villagers and, I suppose, also because each of us had had enough thrashing for the time being. It was a common enough escapade but I have not forgotten it. What I cannot get rid of is that moment in the dusk, against the still fields of sugarcane, when the Brigadier, yelling and swearing, had leapt across the fallen bicycles, to fight for me, me who no one had ever fought for. In that brief moment I had felt that perhaps, I was not alone amidst the sugarcane, abandoned on the plannet. There were other things that we did, things that young men do, things without meaning, except the meaning they acquire when youth is spent. What meaning is there in cycling ten miles, towards the setting sun, your hand on another man's shoulder or swimming across a river before dawn or going to village fairs to look at the girls, or sitting in a mangrove all day preparing for exams but, in fact, talking only x, or just being together from morning till night, day after day, week after week, or laughing at nothing until tears roll down your cheeks.