“May I ask another?”
“Let me hear it.”
Sir Vepa heard it, and dismissed it. “That’s in the same category—argument!”
The man jumped up and protested loudly. “Sit down!” roared Sir Vepa, and the man sat as though he had been hit on the head.
Someone else, five or six seats off, brought up a new question, which also seemed easy enough to answer. But again Sir Vepa ruled, “That does not belong to the subject!”
The man wilted.
Now the first questioner was passing a paper over his shoulder to a third Indian who shook his head violently; he declined to be mixed up in it.
Query after query was disallowed. Finally a weak voice on the side asked about the French birth rate. Sir Vepa turned on him and said, “You look like an intelligent person, but if you have sat for forty minutes listening to this address, and you have not understood it, then you are not intelligent enough to warrant a lady’s coming ten thousand miles and wasting her breath!”
The audience was laughing at Sir Vepa’s judicial sternness. I, on the other hand, was rather depressed. As we were leaving I said to him, “I wish you had let me reply to them.”
His expression held surprise: “I’ve been answering them and battling with these same people for twenty-five years. They only come to confuse. They are enemies of the cause and I give them no quarter!”