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He turned to me. "If you fail in what you say is just a simple task, you pay me a fifty. If you succeed with what you say is possible, I double it. You get a hundred. Is it a deal?"
He turned to Sylvia. "The Principle of the Universal Marriage of Mankind opens up a wide field. Are you prepared to become a part of this wider field and let it unfold?"
"I should invite every opportunity?" said Sylvia.
Fred looked at me.
I shook my head. "No Fred, I know your kind of betting games. I think you have something up your sleeve. No thanks!"
"OK, Peter, I know I have disappointed you once. Considering that I have screwed up in the past, I'll double my offer," he said. He began to grin now. "No, Peter, I will double it again. I will give you four hundred against your fifty, because of the enormous nature of the challenge that I put before you. You speak of a principle. A principle is useful only when it is applied in practice. Verification is the proof of the hypothesis. That's the challenge that science imposes on us all. So my friend, I dare you to master the challenge. Can you apply in real life what you proposed to be a scientific fact? As verification I want you to convince a friend of mine of that fact the marriage of mankind is an established universal reality. She needs to hear this and learn to live with it. She is facing a crisis of some sort. And more than this, I challenge you to get her to understand the principle of it out of her own resources and acknowledge it by committing herself to it. And I want to hear this from her. Her name is Indira. I am going to send you there on a mission to prove to her that she is already married to greatest bunch of people on the planet, that's us." He began to laugh.
"You were saying, her?" I interrupted his laughter.
I looked at Sylvia.
Sylvia nodded.
Fred still smiled. "Yes Peter, the friend that I am referring to is a woman. She is a medical doctor living in India. She's also a Dalit. That makes it quite a challenge, I'm sure. Do you dare to take on that challenge? Four hundred dollars don't seem so big anymore in the light of that comparison, am I right?"
I nodded now too, but I nodded reluctantly.
Fred turned to Sylvia. "Way back in history a woman named Leah gave her handmaiden to her husband to wife in order that she might bear children to enrich the family. Now I am asking you to do the same with a stranger to potentially enrich the family of mankind. Are you ready for that?"
"I would invite it," said Sylvia. "But you've already set the stage."
"OK Pete, you'll leave in a week," said Fred instantly as a reply to Sylvia. He reached his hand out for a handshake. He grinned.
I raised my hand. "Not so fast Fred! She is a Dalit. What does that mean?"
Fred began to laugh. "No Peter, you can't get out of your commitment now. You agreed to the deal. You nodded. With you, that's a promise. However, Peter, don't be afraid of her. She won't bite. She is an untouchable!" Fred laughed some more.
"If she is someone who stands above the law," Ross interjected, "is it safe for Pete to visit her? Is it safe for us to become involved?"
Fred burst into a long dawn out laughter. "No Ross, she isn't related to the Mafia. You've got it all wrong. The untouchables of India are the broken people, the Dalits. They are the lowest of the low. They are even considered lower in status than a dog. They are at the dirt bottom on the social scale. They are held so low in esteem, that by tradition, any person of a higher cast would never consider to even touch one of them, or be near one. The Dalits are the manual scavengers. They call them the scavengers, because they clear the feces from public and private toilettes and dispose of dead animals in the cities, and do other dirty work like that no one else wants to do. As society sees them, they wallow in this shit of their existence for a few scraps of food, just enough to stay alive, like scavengers do. The Dalits are given the lowest occupations in the world. There are millions of people in the Dalit category, which is the absolute bottom in the caste system."
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