It was a small concrete building of two storeys in the bazaar area, and though of concrete it felt fragile. The room Willie was given was stale and stuffy, and when, with too firm a gesture, Willie tried to open the window, the catch, which was of a strangely soft metal, seemed to bend in his hand. Gently, then, not wishing to break anything, he eased the catch free and opened the window. A room service menu standing upright on the small table promised food around the clock, with dishes “from our baker’s basket” and “from the fisherman’s net” and “from the butcher’s block.” Willie knew that it had no meaning, that it had all been copied from some foreign hotel, and was to be taken only as a gesture of goodwill, a wish to please, an aspect of being modern.
He thought he should telephone Joseph. But the red telephone beside the bed, in spite of the printed card that said “Your friends and loved ones are just a few digits away,” was a dummy. He went downstairs and (catching sight of the furtive hotel agent in an inner room) asked to use the desk telephone. The man at the desk was very friendly.
It might have been Joseph himself who answered, bright and clear and reassuring. It was the first clear communication Willie had had since he arrived, the first indication he had had of a kindred mind, and he found himself close to tears.
Joseph said he had classes that morning but would be free in the afternoon. They fixed a time for late afternoon, and Willie went back to his room. He was suddenly exhausted. He lay down in his clothes on the thin mattress of his iron bed and for the first time since Berlin and Frankfurt fell deeply asleep.
A sensation of heat and light wrenched him awake long before he was ready to get up. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was making the open glass window glow. He ached in his eyes and head at being awakened too soon. He felt he had done himself some deep damage. But it was just an hour and a half before his meeting with Joseph, the only person he could hold on to; and he forced himself up from the bristly thin mattress on the iron bed.
The scooter-driver said, “New area,” when Willie gave the address, and they drove—Willie still half in a daze, still with the ache of his sudden awakening—for fifteen or twenty or twenty-five minutes out of the town along main roads in the warm dust and fumes of noisy trucks and buses. They turned off into an unasphalted flinty road that made the little scooter bump up and down, and came finally to a development of concrete apartment blocks on bare, hummocked earth, as though the builders had forgotten or didn’t care to clean up the ground after they had done their work. Many of the blocks were on concrete pillars, and the complicated number or address of each block had been daubed on its pillars in big, dripping numbers and letters.
The elevator shaft of Joseph’s block, situated between pillars, didn’t come all the way down to ground level. It stopped perhaps three feet short, resting on pounded earth as on some rock formation in a cave; and steps cut into this pounded earth led down from the shaft. It might have been done like that for the style of the thing, or to save money; or someone, the architect, the builder, or the shaft-manufacturer, might simply have mis-measured. But, Willie thought, it is an elevator shaft nonetheless: that is how the people living in this block would see it. They would see themselves living in a new and rich area in a modern concrete block with an elevator.
He thought, “I must remember not to mention it to Joseph. He may be a tough customer, not easy to talk to, but I must not make his block, the place where he lives, a topic of conversation. It’s just the kind of thing that fatigue might make me do. I will have to be careful.”
The elevator had folding metal doors. They were black with grease and were very noisy opening and closing. Willie was used to rough building in his remote corner of Africa (where people in their heart of hearts had always known that one day they would have to pack up and leave); but he had seen nothing so unfinished-looking as what he saw when he got out at Joseph’s floor. The building here seemed to have been abandoned at its first brutal stage, with nothing to soften the raw concrete, which was pegged along the top of the corridor walls with many cables, thick and thin and covered with old dust. And all the time, to the distress of Willie, there came the happy cries of children playing in the warm afternoon dust among the dirt mounds in the yard, and the threatening shouts of women.
Joseph opened the door himself. He was a big man, as his voice and manner had suggested, and he was dressed in white or near-white, wearing something which might have been a tunic suit or pyjamas. He would have been about fifty.
He said to Willie, “Do you like my university quarters?”
Willie didn’t fall into the trap. He said, “It’s for you to tell me.”
They were in the sitting room. Through an open door at one corner Willie could see the kitchen, with a woman sitting on the terrazzo floor and kneading something in a basin. Two other doors led to inner rooms, bedrooms perhaps.
Willie also saw that there was in the sitting room a couch or narrow bed spread with bedclothes. Joseph lay down carefully on the couch, and Willie saw that Joseph was an invalid. Below the couch, and nearly all hidden by the bedclothes, could be seen the handle of a chamber pot, and just below Joseph’s head was a tin cup, made perhaps from a condensed milk tin, with a welded tin handle—his spittoon.
Joseph, perhaps seeing the distress in Willie’s face, stood up again and showed himself to Willie. He said, “It isn’t as bad as it looks. You see, I can stand up and move. But I can only move for about a hundred yards a day. That’s not a lot. So I have to ration myself, even here, in my university quarters. Of course, with a car and a chair it is possible to have something like a normal life. But you have seen our lift. So when I am at home I am most disadvantaged. Every trip to the toilet takes up a precious part of my ration. When that is used up it’s pure pain. Something about my spinal cord. I’ve had the trouble before, and they did something then. Now they tell me that it can be cured, but then I will have no sense of balance. Every day I measure one against the other. When I lie down I’m all right. They tell me that there are some people with this condition who are in pain when they lie down or sit still. They have to keep on the move. I can’t imagine that one.”
Willie’s ache began to come back. But he thought he should explain himself. Joseph made a gesture with both hands that told Willie he was to stop. And Willie stopped.
Joseph said, “How do you think it compares with Africa? Here.”
Willie thought, and couldn’t say. He said, “I always had sympathy for Africans, but I saw them from the outside. I never really found out about them. Most of the time I saw Africa through the eyes of the colonists. They were the people I lived with. And then suddenly that life ended, Africa was all around us, and we all had to run.”
Joseph said, “When I was in England I did a course in Primitive Government for my degree. Just after the war. The time of Kingsley Martin and the New Statesman, people like Joad and Laski. Of course, they wouldn’t call it that now, Primitive Government. I loved it. The Kabakas, the Mugabes, the Omukamas, the various chiefs and kings. I loved the rituals, the religion, the sanctity of the drum. So many things I didn’t know about. Not easy to remember. Like you, my attitude to Africa was the colonial one. But that’s where we all have to begin. It was the colonialists who opened up Africa and told us about it. I thought of it as bush, common ground, open to anyone. It took me some time even to understand that when you entered somebody’s territory in Africa you had to pay your dues, as you would anywhere else. Primitive, they say, but I think that’s where the Africans have the edge on us. They know who they are. We don’t. There’s a lot of talk here about ancient culture and so on, but when you ask them they can’t tell you what it means.”
Willie, heavy with sleep, considered the woman in the kitchen. He saw that she was not sitting flat on the terrazzo floor, as he had thought, but on a narrow and very low bench, perhaps about four inches high. With clothes and flesh she overhung her little bench, almost hiding it. Her head was covered, correctly, because Willie was a visitor
; and she was kneading something in a blue-rimmed enamel bowl. But there was something in her back and posture that indicated she was listening to what was being said.
Joseph said, “We are in one of the saddest places in the world here. Twenty times sadder than what you saw in Africa. In Africa the colonial past would have been there for you to see. Here you can’t begin to understand the past, and when you get to know it you wish you didn’t.”
Willie, fighting sleep and the old ache of being awakened too soon, studied the back of the sitting woman and thought, “But this was what Sarojini told me in Berlin. I have heard this before. I used to think that she was trying to motivate me. I respected her for that, but I only half believed the terrible things she was telling me. This must be the way they do it. The cause is good. I believe in it, but I mustn’t let this man agitate me.”
And for a second or two he dozed off.
Joseph must have noticed, because when Willie came to again he thought Joseph, still standing beside his settee, had lost a little of his bounce and earlier style and was trying harder.
Joseph said, “All the land of India is sacred. But here we are on especially sacred ground. We are on the site of the last great Indian kingdom, and it was the site of a catastrophe. Four hundred years ago the Muslim invaders ganged up on it and destroyed it. They spent weeks, possibly months, destroying it. They levelled the capital city. It was a rich and famous city, known to early European travellers. They killed the priests, the philosophers, the artisans, the architects, the scholars. They knew what they were doing. They were cutting off the head. The only people they left behind were the serfs in the villages, and they parcelled them out among themselves. This military defeat was terrible. You cannot understand the degree to which the victors won and the losers lost. Hitler would have called it a war of annihilation, a war without limits and restraints, and this one succeeded to a remarkable degree. There was no resistance. The serfs in the villages policed themselves. They were of various low castes, and there is no caste hatred greater than that of the low for the low, one sub-caste for another. Some ran before and after the horses of their lords. Some did the scavenging. Some did the grave digging. Some offered their women. All of them referred to themselves as slaves. All of them were underfed. That was a matter of policy. It was said that if you fed a slave well he would want to bite you.”
Willie said, “My sister told me that.”
Joseph said, “Who is your sister?”
That took Willie aback. But then almost immediately he understood why Joseph couldn’t pretend to know too much. He said, “She does television in Berlin.”
“Oh. And they were taxed and taxed. There were forty kinds of taxes. After four hundred years of this kind of rule the people here would have grown to believe that this was their eternal condition. They were slaves. They were nothing. I am not going to mention any names. But this was the origin of our sacred Indian poverty, the poverty that India could offer the world. And there was something else. Thirty years after the destruction of the last Indian kingdom the conquerors built a big gate of victory. That gate of victory is now an Indian heritage site. The destroyed city has been forgotten. Defeat can be terrible. You would have thought that at independence all the lords of the conquered people would have been hanged with their families and their bodies left to turn to bones. That would have been a kind of redemption, the beginning of something new. But nothing like that happened. It was left to some very simple people to raise the standard of revolution.”
The door of the flat opened. A tall, dark man, almost as tall as Joseph, came in. He had the figure of a sportsman: broad shoulders, narrow waist, slender hips.
Joseph sat down on his settee. He said, “The government thinks I am the cheerleader for the guerrillas. Well, I am that. I would love nothing better than to see a revolution sweeping everything away. The very thought of that makes my heart light.”
Sounds and smells of cooking came from the kitchen, worrying Willie with old taboos he thought he had abandoned. The woman’s posture had subtly altered.
Joseph said, “My son-in-law. He does research for a pharmaceutical company.”
The dark man with the sportsman’s physique, the well-kept body, turned his face full to Willie for the first time. There was an odd twist of pleasure in the mouth: he clearly liked having his professional skills known right away to a stranger. But the eyes, flecked with red at the corners, were full of a contradictory rage and hatred.
He said, “But as soon as they know you are an untouchable they don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
There were quieter words he might have used, legal words, religious words, government-approved words. But the very anger, humiliation, pride, that had made him give his involuntary twisted smile when Joseph had introduced him correctly had also made him use the brutal, old-fashioned word. Not a word of self-pity so much as a kind of threat to the world outside.
Willie thought, “That man has won his revolution, whatever he says. I had no idea they were fighting this war still. But how difficult he makes the whole thing. He wants it all ways. I don’t think I’ll be able to get on with him. I hope there are not too many of them like this.”
The dark man with his sportsman’s presence swaggered—as it seemed to Willie—through one of the doorways at the end of the sitting room. Joseph was noticeably affected. He seemed momentarily to have lost his flow of words. Inside there was the sound of a lavatory flush. And Willie had some little conviction that in Joseph’s little household, in the brutal concrete flat with the exposed cables and Joseph’s unseen daughter, the revolution had already done some kind of unacknowledged damage.
Joseph said, “Yes, I would love nothing better than to see a revolution sweeping everything away.”
He stopped, as though having to feel for his place in a script. He took up the tin spittoon from below the settee. The handle, made from a strip of tin, was stylishly curved: craftsman’s work. The edge of the strip had been bent back on itself and soldered, to lose its sharpness; and the thicker, slightly irregular edge shone from handling. He held the cup for a while, rubbing his thumb along the edge of the handle, still seeming to feel for his place in the script which his son-in-law’s entry had disturbed.
At last he said, “But at the same time I have no faith in the human material we have left, after the centuries of slavery. Look at this little cricket of a girl here. Our servant.”
Willie looked at the very small hunchbacked figure who had come out from the kitchen to the sitting room and was moving about on her haunches, inches at a time, using a small broom of some soft rushes, making very small gestures. Her clothes were dark and muddy-coloured; they were like a camouflage, concealing her colour, concealing her features, denying her a personality. She was like a smaller version of the cleaning woman Willie had seen days before at the airport.
Joseph said, “She comes from a village. One of those villages I’ve been telling you about, where people ran barefooted before and after the horse of the foreign lord and no one was allowed to cover his thighs in the presence of the lord. She is fifteen or sixteen. No one knows. She doesn’t know. Her village is full of people like her, very small, very thin. Cricket people, matchstick people. Their minds have gone after the centuries of malnourishment. Do you think you can make a revolution with her? It’s what Kandapalli thinks, and I wish him well. But I don’t somehow think it’s what you were expecting after Africa and Berlin.”
Willie said, “I wasn’t expecting anything.”
“When people here talk of the guerrillas they are talking of people like her. It’s not exciting. It’s not Che Guevara and strong men in military fatigues. In every other flat or apartment in this area there is a helpless woman like this from a village, and they will tell you it’s all right, the woman is going to fill out. The old lords have gone away. We are the new lords. People who don’t know will look at her and speak of the cruelty of Indian caste. In fact we are looking at the cruelty of hist
ory. And the most terrible thing is it can’t be avenged. The old lords oppressed and humiliated and injured for centuries. No one touched them. Now they’ve gone away. They’ve gone to the towns, they’ve gone to foreign countries. They’ve left these wretched people as their monument. This is what I meant when I said that you have no idea of the extent to which the victors won and the losers lost here. And it’s all hidden. When you compare this with Africa you will have to say that Africa is all light and clarity.”
The smells of food became stronger, filling Willie with old taboos and strengthening him in the idea of the unhappiness in the revolutionary’s little flat, where a daughter had already been made a kind of sacrifice. He didn’t want to be asked to stay. He made to get up.
Joseph said, “You are staying at the Riviera. You might not think it’s much of a hotel. But for people here it is high-class and international. None of the people you are interested in will want to come to see you there. They will be too noticeable. There is an Indian place called the Neo Anand Bhavan, the new abode of peace, after the Nehru family house. Over here everything’s the neo this or the neo that. It’s a style. It’s the usual Indian thing, with the squat toilet and the bath bucket. Stay there for a week. The people you are interested in will get to know you are there.”
Willie went down in the rackety old elevator. The light had changed. It had turned gold. Night was about to fall. Dust hung in the golden light. But heedless children still played and shouted among the dust hills in the yard, and the voices of contented women still scolded. Just a little while before it had all seemed raw and crowded and hopeless. Now, seeing it for the second time, it was as if it were a tamed view, and this made him rejoice.
Magic Seeds Page 4
