I said, “Rather you learn from the very beginning that I am giving you a try.”

He said, “What!”

I said, “The meaning will become clearer slowly. It enters thick skulls very slowly.”

The wife was shocked. Later on she said to me, “You should not say such a thing to my husband because he can throw you out. I cannot prevent him; I am only a wife, and a childless one.”

Now, you cannot understand…in India, a childless wife is thought to be a curse. She may not be responsible herself, and I know perfectly well that this fellow was responsible, because the doctors told me that he was impotent. But in India, if you are a childless woman….

First, just to be a woman in India, and then to be childless! Nothing worse can happen to anybody. Now if a woman is childless, what can she do about it? She can go to a gynecologist…but not in India! The husband would rather marry another woman.

And the Indian law, made of course by men, allows a husband to marry another woman if the first wife remains childless. Strange, if two people are involved in conceiving a child, then naturally, two people are involved in not-conceiving too. In India, two people are involved in conceiving, but in not-conceiving…only one, the woman.

I lived in that house, and naturally, from the very beginning, a conflict, a subtle current arose between me and the husband, and it continued to grow. It erupted in many ways. First, each and every thing he said, in my presence, I immediately contradicted it, whatsoever it was. What he said was immaterial. It was not a question of right or wrong: it was him or me.

From the beginning the way he looked at me decided how I had to look at him – as an enemy. Now, Dale Carnegie may have written How to Win Friends and Influence People, but I don’t think that he really knows. He cannot. Unless you know the art of creating enemies, you cannot know the art of creating friends. In that, I am immensely fortunate.

I have created so many enemies that you can depend on it, that I must have made a few friends at least. Without creating friends, you cannot create enemies. That is a basic law. If you want friends, get ready for the enemies too. That’s why many, the majority of people, decide to have neither friends nor enemies, just acquaintances. These are thought to be common sense people; in fact they really have uncommon sense. But I don’t have that, whatsoever it is called. I created as many friends as I created enemies, in fact, in the same proportion. I can count on them both. They are both reliable.

The first, of course, was his guru. The moment he entered the house I told my father’s sister, “This man is the worst I have ever seen.”