Magic Seeds

by V. S. Naipaul

A little later he thought, “That was my first idea, in the camp in the teak forest. I allowed that idea to be buried. I had to do that, so that I could live with the people I found myself among. Now that idea has resurfaced, to punish me. I have become a maniac myself. I must get away while I still have time to return to myself. I know I have that time.”

  Later the squad commander said, and he was almost friendly, “Give it six months. In six months you will be all right.” He smiled. He was in his forties, the grandson of a peasant, the son of a gentle clerk in government service; a life of bitterness and frustration showed in his face.

  HE WOULD WALK to where the road had not been blown up. Just under ten miles. It was a simple village road, two strips of concrete on a red dirt surface. No buses plied on that road, no taxis or scooter-taxis. It was a guerrilla area, a troubled area, and taxis and scooters were nervous of getting too near. So he would have to make himself as inconspicuous as he could (the thin towel-shawl, the long shirt with the big side pockets, and trousers: trousers would work) and walk from there to the nearest bus station or train station.

  But at that point this dream of escape broke down. He was on a police list, and the police would be watchful at bus stations and train stations. It was possible for him, as a member of the movement, to hide when he reached the open, so to speak; the movement had a network. As a man running away from the movement, and hiding from the police, he had no protection. Not on his own. He had no local contacts.

  He thought he would wait until the section meeting and open himself to Einstein. It was risky, but there was no one else he felt he could talk to.

  All his doubts about Einstein fell away as soon as he talked to him.

  Einstein said, “There is a better way. A shorter way. It will take us out to another road. I will be coming with you. I am tired, too. There are two villages on the way. I know the weavers in both villages. They will put us up for the night, and they will arrange for a scooter to take us on our way. Past the state border. They have friends on the other side. Weavers have their networks too. You can see that I have been researching this trip. Be careful of these people here. Play along with them, if you have to. If they think you are deserting, they will kill you.”

  Willie said, “Weavers. And scooters.”

  “You are thinking it’s like Raja and his brother. Well, it is like that. But that’s how things sometimes happen. A lot of weaver people working their way up go into scooters. The banks help them.”

  Over the days of the meeting they talked of escape.

  Einstein said, “You can’t just go and surrender to the police. They might shoot you. It’s a complicated business. We have to hide. We might have to hide for a long time. We will do it first with some weaver people in the other state, and then we will move on. We have to get some politicians on our side. They would like to claim the credit for getting us to surrender. They would negotiate with the police for us. It might even be the man I planned to kidnap. That’s the way the world is. People are now on this side, now on that. You didn’t like me when you first saw me. I didn’t like you when I first saw you. The world is like that. Close your mind to nothing. There is something else. I don’t want to know what you might have done while you were in the movement. From now on, just remember this: you have done nothing. Things happened around you. Other people did things. But you did nothing. That is what you must remember for the rest of your life.”

  IT TOOK SIX MONTHS. And for periods this undoing of their life in the movement was like a continuation of that life.

  On the first night, before they reached the weavers’ hut where they were to sleep, they took off their uniforms and buried them, not willing to risk a fire, and not wanting to burn the uniforms in the presence of their weaver hosts. There followed long days of hot, bumpy journeys over different kinds of road in three-wheel scooter-taxis that were low to the ground, the two of them now in one scooter, now (Einstein’s idea, for the security) in separate scooters. The taxi-scooter hood was deep but narrow, like a pram’s, and the sun always angled in. On busier roads fumes and brown exhaust smoke blew over them from all sides, and their skin, stinging from the sun, smarted and became gritty. They rested at night in weaver communities. The small, two-roomed houses seemed to have been built to shelter the precious looms more than the people. There was really no space for Willie and Einstein, but space was found. Each house they came to was like the one they had left, with some local variation: uneven thatch instead of tiles, clay bricks instead of plastered mud and wattle. At last they crossed the state border, and for two or three weeks the weaver network on the other side continued to protect them.

  Willie now had a rough idea where they were. He had a strong wish to be in touch with Sarojini. He thought he might write and ask her to send a letter to the poste restante of a city where they were going.

  Einstein said no. The police now understood that ruse. Poste restante letters were not common, and the police would be looking for poste restante letters from Germany. Because of the weavers they had had a comparatively easy journey so far, and Willie might think they were overdoing the caution; but Willie had to remember that they were on a shoot-on-sight police list.

  They moved to one city, then to another. Einstein was the leader. He was trying now to get someone in public life to talk to the police.

  Willie was impressed. He asked, “How do you know all of this?”

  Einstein said, “I had it from the old section leader. The man who went out and then killed his wife.”

  “So he was planning his break-out all the time I knew him?”

  “Some of us were like that. And sometimes those are the very people who stay and stay, for ten, twelve years, and become quite soft in the head, unfit for anything else.”

  For Willie this time of waiting, this moving to new cities, was like the time he had spent in the street of the tanners, when he didn’t know what was going to follow.

  Einstein said, “We are waiting on the police now. They are going through our case. They want to know what charges have been laid against us before they can accept our surrender. They are having some trouble with you. Someone has informed on you. It’s because of your international connections. Do you know a man called Joseph? I don’t recall a man called Joseph.”

  Willie was about to speak.

  Einstein said, “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. That is our arrangement.”

  Willie said, “There is actually nothing.”

  “That is almost the hardest thing to deal with.”

  “If they don’t accept my surrender, what then?”

  “You hide, or they kill you or arrest you. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  Some time later Einstein announced, “It’s all right, for both of us. Your international connections were not so menacing, after all.”

  Einstein telephoned the police, and the day came when they went to the police headquarters of the town where they were. They went in a taxi and Willie saw a version of what Raja out of his own excitement had shown him in another town a long time ago: an army-style area created in the British time, the now old trees planted at that time, whitewashed four or five feet up from the ground, the white kerbstones of the lanes, the sandy parade ground, the stepped pavilion, the welfare buildings, the two-storey residential quarters.

  The superintendent’s office was somewhere there, on the lower floor. When they entered the office, the man himself, in civilian clothes, stood up, smiling, to welcome them. The gesture of civility wasn’t at all what Willie was expecting.

  He thought, “Bhoj Narayan was my friend. My heart went out to Ramachandra. Without Einstein I wouldn’t have known how to get here. But the man in front of me in this office is much more my kind of person. My heart and mind reach out at once to him. His face radiates intelligence. I have to make no allowances for him. I feel we are meeting as equals. After my years in the bush—years when in order to survive I made myself believe things I wasn’t sure o
f—I feel this as a blessing.”

  SEVEN

  Not the Sinners

  HE THOUGHT AT the end of that civil session with the superintendent, a man at once educated and physically well exercised, that he was in the clear, and he continued to think so even when he was separated from Einstein and taken to a jail in an outlying area. Perhaps because of the difficulties he and Einstein had had in arranging their surrender, and because Einstein, explaining the delays, had at a certain stage talked of the police having to “go through” their cases, Willie had confused the idea of surrender with the idea of amnesty. He had thought that after he had gone to the police headquarters and surrendered, he would be released. And he continued in that hope even when he was taken to the jail, and checked in, as it might be into a rough country hotel, but by rough country staff in khaki. There was a certain repetitiveness about this checking in. The new arrival felt less and less welcome after each piece of the jail ritual.

  “All this is unnerving to me, of course,” Willie thought, “but it is an everyday business to these jail officers. It would be less disturbing to me if I put myself in their place.”

  This was what he tried to do, but they didn’t appear to notice.

  At the end of his checking in he was lodged in a long room, like a barrack room, with many other men. Most of them were villagers, physically small, subdued, but consuming him with their bright black eyes. These men were awaiting trial for various things; that was why they were still in their everyday clothes. Willie did not wish to enter into their griefs. He did not wish to return so soon to that other prison-house of the emotions. He did not want to consider himself one of the men in the long room. And out of his confidence that he was going soon to go away and be free of it all he thought he should write to Sarojini in Berlin—a jaunty, unsuffering letter: the tone was already with him—telling her of all that had happened to him in the years since he had last written.

  But writing a letter wasn’t something that could be done just like that, even if he had had pen or pencil and paper. He could think of writing that letter only the next day, and then the sheet of writing paper that the jailer brought him, as an immense favour, was like a much handled page of an account book, narrow, narrowly ruled, torn at the left edge along perforations, rubber-stamped in purple with the name of the jail at the top on the left, and with a big, black-stamped number on the right. That sheet of paper—thin, curling back on itself at the unperforated edge—cast him down, turned his mind away from writing.

  Over the next two or three days he learned the jail routine. And, having put the idea of imminent release out of his mind, he settled into his new life, as he had settled into the many other lives that had claimed him at various times. The five-thirty wake-up, the standpipes in the yard, the formality of tasteless jail meals, the tedium of outdoor time, the long idle hours on the floor during lock-up time: he sought to adapt to it with an extension of the yoga (as he used to think of it) with which for a long time, since he had come back to India (and perhaps before, perhaps all his life), he had been facing everyday acts and needs that had suddenly become painful or awkward. A yoga consciously practised until the conditions of each new difficult mode of life became familiar, became life itself.

  One morning, a few days after he had come in, he was taken to a room at the front of the jail. The superintendent he liked was there. He liked him still, but at the end of the interview, which was about everything and nothing, he began to feel that his case was not as easy as he had believed. Einstein had spoken of some trouble with Willie’s “international connections.” That could only mean Sarojini and Wolf, and that of course was where his adventure had started. But at the next interview, with the superintendent and a colleague of the superintendent’s, nothing was said about that. There was the incident he had had to forget, the incident Einstein (who clearly knew more than he let on) said he didn’t want to hear about. There had been witnesses, and they might have gone to the police. But nothing was said about that in the front room of the jail. And it was only during the fourth interview that Willie understood that the superintendent and his colleague were interested in the killing of the three policemen. Willie, when he thought of that, was more concerned with the pathos and heroism of Ramachandra; the policemen, unseen, unknown, had died far away.

  In the earlier interviews, when he had been fighting phantoms, he had said more than he knew. He learned now that the superintendent knew the name of everyone in Ramachandra’s squad and knew how close Willie had been to Ramachandra. Since the superintendent also knew the police side of the story his idea of what had happened was more complete than Willie’s.

  Willie floundered. His heart gave way when he found that he was an accessory to the murder of three men and was going to be charged.

  He thought, “How unfair it is. Most of my time in the movement, in fact nearly all my time, was spent in idleness. I was horribly bored most of the time. I was going to tell Sarojini in that semi-comic letter that I didn’t write how little I had done, how blameless my life as a revolutionary had been, and how idleness had driven me to surrender. But the superintendent has quite another idea of my life as a guerrilla. He takes me twenty times more seriously than I took myself. He wouldn’t believe that things merely happened around me. He just counts the dead bodies.”

  WILLIE HAD LONG ago given up counting the beds he had slept in. The India of his childhood and adolescence; the three worried years in London, a student, as his passport said, but really only a drifter, willing himself away from what he had been, not knowing where he might fetch up and what form his life would take; then the eighteen years in Africa, fast and purposeless years, living somebody else’s life. He could count all the beds of those years, and the counting would give him a strange satisfaction, would show him that for all his passivity his life was amounting to something; something had grown around him.

  But he had been undone by the India of his return. He could see no pattern, no thread. He had returned with an idea of action, of truly placing himself in the world. But he had become a floater, and the world had become more phantasmagoric than it had ever been. That unsettling feeling, of phantasmagoria, had come to him the day when poor Raja, with boyish excitement, had taken him for a ride in his three-wheel scooter, to show him “the enemy”: the local police headquarters with its old trees and sandy parade ground, watched over at the gate by heavily armed men of the reserve police force standing behind stained and dirty sandbags that had gone through a monsoon. Willie knew the road and its drab sights. But everything he saw on his excursion that day had a special quality. Everything was fresh and new. It was as though after being a long time below ground he had come up to the open. But he couldn’t stay there, couldn’t stay with that vision of freshness and newness. He had to go back with Raja and his scooter to the other world.

  Phantasmagoria was confusing. He had at some time lost the ability to count the beds he had slept in; there was no longer any point; and he had given up. Now, in this new mode of experience that had befallen him—interviews, appearances in court, and being shifted about from jail to jail: he had had no idea of this other, whole world of prisons and a prison service and criminals—he started again, not going back to the very beginning, but starting with the day of his surrender.

  The day came when he thought he should write to Sarojini. The jaunty mood had long ago left him; when at last he lay face down on the coarse, brightly coloured jail rug on the floor and began writing on the narrow ruled paper he was surprised by grief. He thought of his first night in the camp in the teak forest; all night the forest was full of the flappings and cries of birds and other creatures calling for help that wouldn’t come. The writing posture was awkward, and the narrow lines, when he tried to write between them, seemed to cramp his hand. In the end he thought he shouldn’t extend his obedience to the ruled lines. He let his writing spread over two lines. He needed more paper and he found that there was no trouble about that, once it was signed for. He had thoug
ht that a letter from jail could be on only one sheet; he hadn’t asked; he assumed that in jail the world had shrunk in every way.

  Assuming that they made no trouble in the jail about his letter, it should get to Sarojini in Berlin in a week, assuming her address hadn’t changed. Assuming that she replied right away, and assuming that the people in the jail made no trouble about it, her reply would get to him in a week. Two weeks, then.

  But two weeks passed, and three weeks, and four weeks. And there was no letter from Sarojini. The waiting was a strain, and a way of dealing with it was to give up altogether, to say that nothing was going to come. This was what Willie did. And, as it happened, his court life and jail life at this time had become dramatic.

  He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He told himself it could have been worse. The jail to which he was finally taken had a big board above the front gate. On this board was painted, in tall, narrow letters, HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER. He saw it from the prison van as he went in, and he often thought about it. Was it Gandhian, this expression of a difficult kind of forgiveness, or was it Christian? It could have been both, since many of the mahatma’s ideas were also Christian. He often imagined the letters on the other side of the front wall of the jail. What was painted on the inside of the wall was THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT. This was not meant for the prisoners, but for visitors.

  One day he had a letter. The stamps were Indian, and on the Indian envelope (no mistaking that) the address of the sender was an address Willie knew well: it was the house where he had grown up, the address of his father’s pathetic ashram. He would have been unwilling to unfold the pages (the jail people had cut the envelope open at the top) if he hadn’t seen that the letter was not from his father, but from Sarojini, unexpectedly transported from Charlottenburg. She was instantly, in Willie’s mind, stripped of the style Berlin had given her. She came back to him as she was twenty-eight years or so before, before Wolf, and travel, and her transformation. And it was as though something of that earlier personality had repossessed her as she wrote her letter.