The rule of privacy, of not saying too much about oneself and not inquiring into people’s circumstances in the world outside, which had been laid down during his first night in the camp in the teak forest, that rule still held.
He knew only about the man in the room next to his. This man was dark and fierce and with big eyes. When he was a child or in his teens he had been badly beaten up by the thugs of some big landlord, and ever since then he had been in revolutionary movements in the villages. The first of those movements, historically the most important, had faded away; the second had been crushed; and now, after some years of hiding, he was on his third. He was in his mid or late forties, and no other style of life was possible for him. He liked tramping through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely uneducated, and he was a killer. He sang dreadful revolutionary songs whenever he could; they contained the sum of his political and historical wisdom.
He told Willie one day, “Some people have been in the movement for thirty years. Sometimes on a march you may meet one, though they are hard to find. They are skilled at hiding. But sometimes they like to come out and talk to people like us and boast.”
Willie thought, “Like you.”
And repeatedly during the evening of his return, hearing the man next door singing his revolutionary songs again and again (the way some boys at Willie’s mission school used to sing hymns), Willie thought, “Perhaps some feeling of purpose will come back to me.”
Once or twice during the night he got up and went outside. There were no outhouses; people just used the forest. There were no lights in the village. There was no moon. He was aware of the sentries with guns. He gave the password, and then a little while later he had to give it again, so that as he walked he felt the strange word “comrade” echoing about him, as question and reassurance. The forest was black, and full of sound: sudden wing-beating, amid cries of alarm and pain from birds and other creatures, calling for help that wouldn’t come.
Willie thought, “The most comforting thing about life is the certainty of death. There is no way now for me to pick my way back to the upper air. Where was the upper air? Berlin? Africa? Perhaps there is no upper air. Perhaps that idea has always been a mirage.”
In the morning someone knocked on the door of Willie’s room and came in before Willie answered. The man who came in carried an AK-47. He was as pale as Einstein, but much smaller, about five feet. He was very thin, with a skeletal but handsome face and bony, nervous hands. Another six or seven inches would have given him an immense presence.
He said, “My name is Ramachandra. I am a unit commander. Your unit commander now. You are no longer a courier. We have received instructions that you are to be admitted into my unit. You have proved yourself. Today or tomorrow we will be having a section meeting to discuss the new situation. The meeting will be here or somewhere else. I don’t know as yet. You must hold yourself ready to start marching this evening.”
He had small, hard, mad eyes. He fingered his gun with his bony fingers all the time he spoke. And then, attempting another kind of style, he turned abruptly and walked out of the room.
Like Einstein, Ramachandra was a man of an upper caste, perhaps the highest. Such people were having a hard time in the world outside; populist governments had set up all kinds of barriers against them since independence; many of them, fearing slow impoverishment at home, were now migrating to the United States, Australia, Canada, England. Ramachandra and Einstein were doing something else. Within the movement, they were embracing their persecutors. Willie, with his mixed background—his upper-caste father, placid, inactive, with a strain of asceticism, always expecting things to work out; his more fiery mother, many stages down, wishing to seize the world—Willie understood these men very well.
He thought, “I thought I had left all of this behind. But now it’s all here, just as it was, leaping out at me. I have been around the world, but still it’s here.”
THERE WAS NO night march through the forest for Willie, to his great relief. The section meeting was held in the village where he was. They assembled all the next day, arriving not in various disguises, as they did in the town, but in uniform; and in a great show of fellowship they ate the simple village food, peppery lentils and flat bread made of millet.
Einstein came. Willie had been fearing to meet him again, but now, after Ramachandra, Willie was ready to forgive the malevolence in his eyes and even ready to think that Einstein had softened.
There also came the leader of the camp in the teak forest, who all that time before had sent Willie with Bhoj Narayan to the street of the tanners. He was smooth and civil, even seductive, with wonderful manners, speaking softly and yet careful in his intonations, like an actor. Willie had mentally put him in a grey double-breasted suit and made him a university teacher or a civil servant in the world outside. Wondering what had driven a man apparently so complete to the guerrillas and their hard life in the bush, Willie, following some kind of instinct, had seen him as a man tormented by the infidelities of his wife. Willie had later thought: “I wasn’t making it up. I saw that because for some reason he wanted me to see it. It was the message he was transmitting to me.” Now, meeting the man again after two years, still seeing the far-off pain in his eyes, Willie thought, adhering half in a joke to his first assessment, “Poor fellow. With that awful wife.” And treated him like that right through.
The meeting was in Ramachandra’s hut. It began at about ten; that was the usual time for these section meetings. There was a pressure lamp. In the beginning it roared and was dazzling; then it settled down to a hum, and became duller and duller. Brown jute sacking had been spread on the earth floor, and over the sacking there were cotton sheets and blankets, with pillows and bolsters.
The civil man, the leader at the camp in the teak forest, gave the news. It was very bad. Much more had been lost than the men in the railway colony. They were only part of one squad, and three full squads had been wiped out by the police. All the weapons that had been assembled piece by piece over a year had been lost. That was a loss of many hundreds of thousands of rupees, and there had been nothing to show for it.
The leader said, “In a war losses have to be digested. But these losses are exceptional, and we have to rethink our strategy. We have to give up our plan to take the war to the small towns at the fringe of our liberated areas. It was perhaps too ambitious at this stage. Though it should be said that in war ambition sometimes pays off. We will, of course, start up again in those places, or places like them. But that’s in the future.”
Einstein said, “The poison of Kandapalli’s teaching is responsible for what has happened. The idea of organising the people through the people sounds pretty, and people abroad will applaud it. But we who know the reality know that the peasants have to be disciplined before they can become foot soldiers of the revolution. You have to rough them up a little bit.”
A dark man said, “How can you talk like this when you yourself are of a peasant family?”
Einstein said, “That’s why I talk as I do. I never hide what I come from. There is no beauty in the peasant. That is Kandapalli’s teaching. He is a man of a high caste, though he suppresses his caste suffix. He is wrong because this movement is not a movement of love. No revolution can be a movement of love. If you ask me, I will tell you that the peasants ought to be kept in pens.”
Somebody else said, “How can you talk in this cruel way when people like Shivdas serve the movement so loyally?”
Einstein said, “Shivdas is loyal because he needs us. He wants people in the village to see how close we are to him. He uses our friendship to terrorise the villagers. Shivdas is very black and very thin and he gives us his bedroom and he talks revolution and land redistribution. But he is a crook and a thug. The big landowners and the old feudal officials have run away. There is no policeman or s
urveyor in his village, and every year Shivdas reaps many acres of other people’s crops and ploughs many acres of other people’s land. If people didn’t think we were with him they would have killed him long ago. The day Shivdas thinks it will serve him better he will betray us to the police. The revolutionary has at all times to be clear-sighted, and to understand the poor human material he might have the misfortune to work with. If Commander Bhoj Narayan hadn’t been led astray by our African friend we wouldn’t have had the calamity we have come here to discuss.”
People looked at Willie. Ramachandra’s eyes were hard.
The man acting as chairman, the leader of the camp in the teak forest, and clearly now the section leader, said to Willie, “I think you should have the opportunity to say something.”
Willie said, “The commander is right. I feel responsible. I feel especially responsible for what happened to Bhoj Narayan. He was my friend. I wish to say that too.”
Einstein looked appeased. And there was a general relaxation in the meeting. Self-criticism was part of these meetings. When it came quickly it had a good effect: it bonded people together.
The leader said, “Chandran has spoken generously. I think he should be commended for that.”
Gradually, then, through many interruptions, through inquiries about the loss of the squads and the arms, and the arrest of Bhoj Narayan, and through long discussions about the nature of the peasantry as compared with the nature of the urban proletariat (a favourite topic), the leader came to the new strategy that the movement had decided on.
The section leader said, “We will give up taking the war to the small towns, as I said. Instead, we will push deeper into the forest. Each section will take over a hundred and fifty villages. We will administer these villages, and we will announce that we have expanded the liberated areas. This will help with the loss of morale. It will not be easy. It will be hard, but it is the way ahead.”
The meeting ended after three hours. Long before then they had said what they wanted to say. They began to repeat things. They began to say “Personally I feel” or “I very much feel,” to add passion to what they had said before; it was a sign they were flagging. The pressure lamp itself gradually dimmed; and then could not be pumped higher.
Afterwards—the pressure lamp fading fast to its limp brown mantle, the meeting breaking up, some people hanging around for a few last words, but standing now (in bare feet or olive socks) on the sheets and sacking and amid the pillows and bolsters where they had been sitting, others recovering their boots from the many boots at the doorway, and then picking their way with flashlights to their huts, the flashlights making the forest bigger and the surrounding night blacker—afterwards Einstein came to Willie just before he left the hut and said in a neutral voice, “The weaver-caste man went to the police, didn’t he?”
Willie said, “It looks like it.”
“He paid the price. So I suppose the police will get Bhoj Narayan under Section 302. Did people see?”
Willie said, “The brother.”
Einstein’s eyes became far away. A second or two later he blinked, gave a little nod as if acknowledging something, and pressed his lips: a man filing away information.
Willie thought, “I hope I haven’t made another mistake.”
WITHIN A MONTH there began the push deeper into the forest to extend the liberated area. Every squad was given its own route, the list of villages it had to occupy and re-educate. Sometimes two squads might for a stretch follow the same route, and sometimes, exceptionally, two or three squads might camp together for a short time in one of the larger villages. Only people at the top knew how the squads were deployed and what the strategy was; only they knew the extent of the new liberated area. Everybody else took the hard campaign on trust: the long marches in the forest, the poor food and bad water, the days spent among nervous, passive villagers and tribal people, who (prepared by a tough “warm-up” group that had been sent on ahead) from time to time were assembled and made to speak of their “problems,” or simply clapped their hands and sang village songs. The squad leader, if he could, might offer a solution to the problems that he had heard about. If he couldn’t, he spoke (always in the same simple words and slogans) of the idea and promise of the liberated area; he laid down a few of the new rules, and the people’s new loyalties. And then the squad marched on, with a promise to return in some months, to see how people were getting on with their new gift of freedom.
It was a strange time for Willie, a step down into yet another kind of life: patternless labour, without reward or goal, without solitude or companionship, without news of the outside world, with no prospect of letters from Sarojini, with nothing to anchor himself to. In the beginning he had tried to hold on to his idea of time, his idea of the thread of his life, in his old way, counting the beds he had slept in since he was born (like Robinson Crusoe marking each day with a notch on a piece of wood, as he had thought, going back to one of the books of his mission school). But that counting of beds had become harder and harder with the undifferentiated days of marching, the villages almost all the same. Many months had passed since the life of marching and camping had begun; perhaps a year, perhaps more. What had been painful in the beginning, stretching out the days, had become habit. He felt his memory slipping, like time now, and with that slipping of memory the point of the mental exercise disappeared. It became too strenuous, too frustrating; it caused his head to hurt. He gave it up; it was like shedding a piece of himself.
In the squad the nearest thing to companionship was with Ramachandra, the commander. What separated Willie from the rest of the squad was what attracted Ramachandra.
One day they were resting in the forest. A villager and his wife passed by, the woman with a bundle on her head. The villager greeted Willie and Ramachandra. Willie called back, “Are you going far?” The man said they were going on a visit to some relations many miles away. Then with a smile he said, “If I had a camera I would give you a good memory of this moment. ‘Lost in the woods.’” And he laughed.
Ramachandra was at once on his guard. He asked Willie, “Are they mocking us?”
Willie said, “No, no. He was only being friendly. Though I must say I’ve never heard a villager making such an elaborate joke. He didn’t just say we looked lost, which was all that he meant. He brought in the camera, for the joke. He probably got it from a film.”
After the villager and his wife had passed Ramachandra said, “They say that your father is a temple priest. An upper-caste man. If that is true, why are you here? Why aren’t you in England or the United States? That’s where many of my relations are.”
Willie outlined his life in England, Africa and Berlin. In the forest the very names were full of dazzle, even when Willie (not wishing to arouse jealousy and careful not to overdo the personal drama) talked of failure and humiliation and hiding. Ramachandra showed no jealousy. His eyes softened. He wanted to hear more. It was as though Willie, in those far-off places, was experiencing for him as well. And from time to time thereafter, but never too often, and never wishing to appear too friendly, he sought Willie out to talk of far-off things.
About two weeks later he said, “I was not like you. You are middle class. I was a country boy. I was poor. But you must understand. When I was poor and in the country I wasn’t thinking all the time that I was poor. That’s what a lot of people in the movement don’t understand. When I was in the country I used to think that our life was just a regular kind of life. I used to graze cattle with a low-caste boy, a harijan, as people said in those days. Imagine: grazing cattle and not thinking anything of it. The harijan boy used to come home with me sometimes. My father didn’t mind. He thought the boy was ambitious and he thought that was what mattered in people. My mother didn’t mind either, but she refused point blank to wash any cup or glass the boy used. So I washed any glass or cup the boy used. I wonder if the boy knew. You know what happened to him? He was ambitious—my father was right. He is a senior teacher now, th
at boy, as oily as a paratha and as fat as a barrel. And I am here.”
Willie, thinking hard, as though there were still any number of traps he had to avoid with Ramachandra, said, “He is where he wants to be. You are where you want to be.”
Ramachandra said, “It was only when I went to the town, to go to a college, that I understood how poor we were. You are used to seeing me in uniform. But when I first went to the town I used to wear a long shirt and pyjama. Our politicians make a point of wearing country clothes, to show how much they care for the common man, but for true country people those clothes can be a cause for shame. When I first went to the town I was ashamed of my clothes all the time. My college friends noticed. They were richer than me. Or let’s say they had a little more money than me. They took me to a tailor and had a suit stitched for me. Two or three days later we went to the shop and they helped me put the suit on. I could hardly believe it when I looked down at myself. All that fine cloth. I wondered whether I would ever have the courage to go out into the street wearing all that cloth. It’s not so easy now to remember those first few moments of wearing a suit—I’ve got so used to it. Then the tailor asked me to look at myself in the long mirror. That was another shock. The country boy had vanished. A city man was looking at me. But then something unexpected happened. I became full of sexual rage. I was a city man. I had a city man’s needs. I wanted a girl. But no girl would look at me.”
Willie considered the pale, pared-down, handsome face set on the thin, small body, still not much more than the body of the small boy grazing cattle in the village. The body seemed to mock the beauty of the face, to render it null; the eyes that could appear so hard were really also full of pain.
Magic Seeds Page 10
