Magic Seeds

TWO. PEACOCKS

THEY BEGAN TO WAIT for Kandapalli. But no word came from him. The summer began to fade.

Sarojini said, “You mustn’t be disheartened. This is just the first of many trials. It happens when you are doing something unusual, and Wolf says it wouldn’t be as easy for you as it would be for a tribal on the spot. They would be worried by exotics like you. We ourselves had a lot of trouble with Kandapalli’s people, and we were only making a film. If you were a tribal you would just have to go to someone in trousers — that’s the way they think of people in authority: trousers-people — and say, ‘Dada, I want to join the movement.’ And the trousers-man would say, ‘What is the name of your village? What is your caste? What is the name of your father?’ All the information needed would be in those simple replies, and it can be easily checked. They would need a little longer to work you out. We told them about our mother’s uncle, and we told them about your African background. We stressed the radical side.”

Willie said, “I would have liked to start without any stories. I would have liked to be myself. To make a clean start.”

She seemed not to hear. “You will have to do a lot of walking. You should practise now. Wear canvas shoes. Toughen up the soles of your feet.”

He spent hours walking in the sandy forests of Berlin. He let the paths lead him on. One afternoon he came to a sun-struck clearing, and before he could fully take in where he was he found himself walking between scores of naked, staring men stretched out on the long grass, among the bicycles that had no doubt brought some of them there. The bicycles lay on their sides on the grass, and the twisted postures of men and machines seemed oddly expectant and alike.

When he told Sarojini of the unnerving little adventure she said, “That’s a homosexual area. It’s well known. You should be careful. Otherwise you’ll be getting into trouble long before you get to Kandapalli.”

The leaves on some trees were beginning to turn, and day by day the light was taking a yellower tone.

One day Sarojini said, “At last. Wolf has had a letter from India from a man called Joseph. He’s a university lecturer. You can tell by the name that he’s a Christian. He’s not underground. He’s very much in the open, and he takes care to keep his nose clean. All these movements have people like that. Useful for us, useful for them, useful for the authorities. Joseph will see you, and if he likes you he will pass you on.”

AND SO, AFTER more than twenty years, Willie saw India again. He had left India with very little money, the gift of his father; and he was going back with very little money, the gift of his sister.

India began for him in the airport in Frankfurt, in the little pen where passengers for India were assembled. He studied the Indian passengers there — people he most likely wasn’t going to see again after a few hours — more fearfully than he had studied the Tamils and other Indians in Berlin. He saw India in everything they wore and did. He was full of his mission, full of the revolution in his soul, and he felt a great distance from them. But detail by detail the India he was observing, in the airport pen, and then in the aircraft, the terrible India of Indian family life — the soft physiques, the way of eating, the ways of speech, the idea of the father, the idea of the mother, the crinkled, much-used plastic shop bags (sometimes with a long irrelevant printed name) — this India began to assault him, began to remind him of things he thought he had forgotten and put aside, things which his idea of his mission had obliterated; and the distance he felt from his fellow passengers diminished. After the long night, he felt something like panic at the thought of the India that was approaching, the India below the colour-destroying glare he could see from his window. He felt, “I thought of the two worlds, and I had a very good idea of the world to which I belonged. But now, really, I wish I could go back a few hours and stand outside the Patrick Hellmann shop in Berlin, or go to the oyster and champagne bar in the KDW.”

It was early morning when they landed, and he was better able to control his emotions. The light was already stinging, heat was already rising from the tarmac. The small, shabby airport building was full of movement and echoing noise. The Indian passengers from the aeroplane were already different, already at home, already (with briefcases and cardigans and the plastic bags from shops in famous foreign cities) with an authority that separated them from lesser local folk. The black-bladed ceiling fans were busy; the metal rods or shanks that fixed them to the ceiling were furry with oil and sifted dust.

Willie thought, “It’s an airport. I must think of it like that. I must think of all that that means.”

The carpentry was not what Willie expected in an airport building. It was not much above the carpentry of the rough beach-side weekend restaurants Willie had known in Africa (where roughness would have been part of the style and atmosphere). The concrete walls were whitewashed in a rough-and-ready way, with paint splashed beyond concrete on glass and wood; and for many inches above the terrazzo floor the walls were grimy from broom and dirty washing-water. A blue plastic bucket and a short dirty broom made of the ribs of coconut branches stood against the wall; not far away a small, dark, squatting woman in a camouflage of dark clothes moved slowly on her haunches, cleaning, giving the floor a suggestion of thinly spread grime.

Willie thought, “Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have seen what I am seeing now. I am seeing what I see because I have made myself another person. I cannot make myself that old person again. But I must go back to that old way of seeing. Otherwise my cause is lost before I have begun. I have come from a world of waste and appearances. I saw quite clearly some time ago that it was a simple world, where people had been simplified. I must not go back on that vision. I must understand that now I am among people of more complicated beliefs and social ideas, and at the same time in a world stripped of all style and artifice. This is an airport. It works. It is full of technically accomplished people. That is what I must see.”

Joseph lived in a provincial city some hundreds of miles away.

It was necessary for Willie to take a train. To take a train it was necessary for him to take a taxi to the railway station; and then, having found at the booking office (cave-like, hidden away from the fierce light of day, with very dim fluorescent lighting) that the trains for the next few days were full, it was necessary for him either to stay in one of the railway station’s accommodation rooms or to find a hotel. And soon India, with all its new definitions of things (taxi, hotel, railway station, waiting room, lavatory, restaurant), and all its new disciplines (squatting in the lavatory, eating only cooked food, avoiding water and soft fruit), engulfed him.

There is a kind of yoga in which the disciple is required to move very slowly, concentrating the while on what his mind is making his body do; until after months of practise (or, for the worldly and ungifted, perhaps years) the disciple feels each separate muscle move within himself, minutely obeying the impulses of his mind. For Willie, in those first days of return to India, the mechanics of day-to-day life had become a kind of yoga like that, a series of hurdles; every simple thing had to be re-thought, learned afresh.

(Yoga: shut away in his Indian hotel room, with the windows open to noise and smells, or in the street outside, Willie found himself, within his intense and fast-moving interior life, fixing intermittently on Africa, and remembering that near the end of the colonial time yoga had become something of a rage among middle-aged women, as though the simple shared recognition of spiritual and bodily perfection as an ideal was going to make their collapsing world more bearable.)

He had wondered for some time in Berlin about the books he should bring with him. His first idea was that after his long forest marches and in the silence of village huts he would need light reading. The reading habit had more or less left him in Africa, and all he could think of was Three Men in a Boat, which he had never finished, and a thriller of the 1930s by Freeman Wills Crofts called The Cask or The Cask Mystery. He had happened on a tattered paperback copy of the Crofts in somebody’s house in Africa. He had lost the book (or it had been taken back) before he had read very far, and the very faint memory of the mystery (London, a floating cask in the river, calculations about tides and currents) had remained with him, like a kind of poetry. But it occurred to him, before he began looking for those books in Berlin, that he would come to the end of them very quickly. And there was this further complication: those books would, with his complicity, create pictures in his head of a world for which he had no further use. So in an insidious way they were corrupting, and not at all as harmless and “light” as he thought.

He gave up the idea of books. But then one day, near the end of his walk, he had gone into an antique shop, attracted by its casual choked display of coloured glass and lamps and vases and other rich-looking and delicate things of the 1920s and 1930s which had somehow survived the war. There were books on one table, mainly paper-bound German books in the German black letter; but among them, and noticeable because of their faded cloth binding and English script, were English-language textbooks about algebra, advanced geometry, and mechanics and hydrostatics. These books had been printed in the 1920s, and the paper, from that earlier time of stringency, was cheap and grey; perhaps some student or teacher had brought these textbooks from England to Berlin. Willie had liked mathematics at school. He had liked the logic, the charm of solutions; and it occurred to him now that these were the books he would need in the forest. They would keep his mind alive; they would not repeat; they would move from lesson to lesson, stage to stage; they would offer no disturbing pictures of men and women in played-out, too-simple societies.

In his Indian hotel now, near the railway station, with a night and a day to spend before he could get on the train to Joseph’s town, Willie took the books out from his little canvas suitcase, to get started on his new discipline. He began with the geometry book. The ceiling light was very dim. He could barely see the faint print on the old grey paper. His straining eyes began to ache. To deal with the problems he needed paper and a pen or pencil. He had none of those things. So there was nothing he could do. But he couldn’t hide from himself the fact that the geometry book and the others were too hard for him. He had overestimated his powers; he needed to start at a lower level; and even then it was clear he would need a teacher and an encourager. He had been reading, or trying to read, in bed; there was no table in the little room. He put the books back in the canvas case.

He thought, “I would have had to get rid of those books anyway. They would have given me away.”

This failure, so simple, so quick, so comprehensive, before he had got started, filled him with gloom, made it hard for him to stay in the little room with the blotched walls, and even harder for him to go out into the warm, buzzing city. The books had given him a kind of pride, a kind of protection. Now he was naked. He ground out the night, ticking off the quarter-hours, and he ground out the next day. And all the way in the train to Joseph’s town his gloom grew; but all the time, through the night, through all the stops at squalling railway stations, the train was taking him on, whether he liked it or not, to what he had now committed himself to.

In the early morning, when the sun rose, the moving train cast a complete shadow from the top of the coaches to the wheels on the rails. He looked for his own shadow, and when he found it he played with it for a while, moving his head and hands and seeing the shadow answer. He thought, “That’s me.” It was oddly reassuring, seeing himself at this distance, possessed of life like everybody else.

THE TOWN IN which Joseph lived was big, but it was without a metropolitan feel. The road outside the station was a mess, with a lot of urgent shouting and excitement but very little movement. Everybody was in everybody else’s way. Pedal rickshaws and scooter rickshaws and taxis competed for space with horse-drawn or mule-drawn carriages that tilted dangerously downwards at the back, seemingly about to throw out their heavy load of women and children. There were various hotel agents about, and Willie, choosing at random, allowed himself to be led by one of these men to the Hotel Riviera. They took a carriage. “Modern, all modern,” the Riviera man said all the time, and then vanished as soon as he led Willie into the little lobby of the hotel, as though not wishing now to be held responsible for anything.

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 history. 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.

He thought, “It was never going to be easy, what I am doing.”

THE ACHE of broken sleep was still in his bones, still in his head. But the actual sleepiness had gone. He went walking in the bazaar, the lights coming on around him, looking for the cheapest and simplest and safest cooked food he could find. He was not really hungry now, but he wished to practise whenever he could what he thought of as the new yoga of his day-to-day living, in which every act and need was to be worked out again, reduced to what was most basic. He was amazed to find how far he had come, how adaptable he was. A year ago or less there were, after the splendours and excesses of the colonial time, the deprivations and camp life, the siege conditions of Africa towards the end of the war. Just a few days before there was all the bustle and luxury of West Berlin. Just a few minutes before there was the comparative comfort and order of Joseph’s kitchen. And now he was here, in the dim and varied lights of the bazaar, the smoky flambeau, the hurricane lamp, the pressure lamp, looking with excitement for what he might subsist on, wishing to take his needs down and ever further down. Soon, he knew, when he found himself in forest or countryside, this bazaar would appear an impossible luxury. There would be other foods, other austerities: he would be ready for them when they came. He was already in his own mind a kind of ascetic, almost a seeker. He had never known anything like it — Africa in the bad days had been the opposite of this, had been suffering alone — and it made him lightheaded.

He spent a penny or so on a dish of spicy chickpeas. It had been simmering for hours, and would be safe. It was served to him in a leaf bowl, a bowl made of a dried leaf pinned together with pieces of twig. The spices burnt his tongue, but he ate with relish, surrendering to his new simplicity. He went back to the Riviera, and the warmth in his stomach soon returned him to his interrupted sleep.

The next day he moved to the Neo Anand Bhavan, and after the exaltation of his night at the Riviera there followed the emptiest and most tormenting days Willie had ever known, days of waiting in an almost empty room with a strong sewer smell for unknown people to come and take him on to his destiny. The walls were a strange mottled colour, as though they had absorbed all kinds of vile liquids; below the coconut mat dust was at least a quarter of an inch thick; and the ceiling bulb gave hardly any light. He had thought in the beginning that he should always be there, in the room, waiting for the person who was going to come for him. It was only later that he thought that this person would have time on his hands and would be prepared to wait. So he prowled about the town, and found himself going with many other people to the railway station, for the excitement of the trains, the crowds, the harsh calls of hawkers and the cries of wounded or beaten dogs.

One evening on the station platform he found a little swivel stand of very old American paperbacks, discarded stock, dirt seeming to have worked itself into the shiny covers, rather like the ancient electronic goods that on occasion turned up in certain traders’ shops in Africa, with the instruction leaflets yellow with age. He wanted nothing that would remind him of the world he had abjured. He rejected and rejected, and then at last he lighted on two books that seemed to meet his need. A book from the 1950s or 1960s about Harlem, The Cool World, a novel, told in the first person; and a book about the Incas of Peru, the Royal Commentaries, by a man partly of the Inca royal family. Willie could hardly believe his luck.

At the Neo Anand Bhavan they gave him a hurricane lantern to read by. He would have liked candles, for their old-fashioned romance, but they had no candles. And then, as before, when he had tried the mathematical books, he soon floundered. The Royal Commentaries required knowledge of a sort that Willie didn’t have; it very quickly became abstract. And The Cool World was simply too far away, too American, too New York, too full of allusions he couldn’t get.

Willie thought, “I have to understand now that, in this venture, books are a cheat. I have to depend on my own resources.”

It didn’t become easier for him at the Neo Anand Bhavan. He began then consciously to concentrate on the yoga of his hour-to-hour life, looking on each hour, each action, as challenging and important. No segment of time was to be wasted. Everything was to be part of his new discipline. And in this new discipline the idea of waiting on external events was to be banished.

He lived intensely; he became absorbed in himself. He found he had begun to deal with time.

And then one day the courier arrived. The courier was very young, almost a boy. He wore the local style of loincloth and long-tailed shirt.

He said to Willie, “I will come for you in seven days. I have to look for some of the others.”

Willie said, “What clothes should I wear?”

The courier didn’t appear to understand. He said, “What clothes do you have?” He might have been a college boy.

Willie spoke to him as though he was that. He said, “What would be best for me? Should I wear canvas shoes, or should I be barefoot?”

“Please don’t be barefoot. That will be asking for trouble. There are scorpions and all kinds of dangerous things on the ground. The local people wear ox-hide slippers.”

“What about food? You must tell me what to do.”

“Get some sattoo. It’s a kind of powdered roasted grain. You can buy it in the bazaar. It’s actually like sand when it’s dry. When you are hungry you mix it with a little water. Very little, just enough to soften it. It’s very tasty, and it lasts. It’s what people use when they travel. The other thing you might get is a local towel or shawl. Everyone here has a towel. It’s about four or five feet long, with tasselled ends, and about two feet wide. You wear it around the neck or over a shoulder. The material is very thin and fine. You can dry yourself with it after a bath, and it dries very quickly, in about twenty minutes. I will come for you in seven days. In the meantime I will report that I have found you.”

Willie went to the bazaar to buy sattoo. It wasn’t as easy as he thought. There were different kinds, made from different grains.

Willie, in his new mood, thought, “What ritual, what beauty.”

Seven days later the college boy came back for him. The college boy said, “Those other fellows made me waste a lot of time. They weren’t really interested. They were just talking. One of them was an only son. He had a bigger loyalty to his family. The other one just loved the good life.”

They went in the evening to the railway station, and there they took a passenger train. A passenger train was a slow train, stopping at all the halts. At every halt there was commotion and racket and pushing and shoving and grating voices raised in complaint or protest or just raised for the formality of the thing. At every halt there was dust and the smell of old tobacco and old cloth and old sweat. The schoolboy slept through most of it. Willie thought in the beginning, “I am going to have a shower at the end of this.” Then he thought that he wouldn’t: that wish for hour-to-hour comfort and cleanliness belonged to another kind of life, another way of experiencing. Better to let the dust and dirt and smells settle on him.

They travelled all night, but the passenger train had actually covered very little ground; and then in the bright light of morning the schoolboy left Willie, saying, “Someone will come for you here.”

Behind the screen doors and the thick walls the waiting room was dark. People, wrapped up from head to toe in blankets and dirty grey sheets, were sleeping on benches and the floor. At four o’clock that afternoon Willie’s second courier came, a tall, thin, dark man in a local loincloth of a gingham pattern, and they began walking.

After an hour Willie thought, “I no longer know where I am. I don’t think I will be able to pick my way back. I am in their hands now.”

They were now far from the railway town, far from the town. They were deep in the country, and it was getting dark. They came to a village. Even in the dark Willie could see the trimmed eaves of the thatched roof of the important family of the village. The village was a huddle of houses and huts, back to back and side to side, with narrow angular lanes. They walked past all the good houses and stopped at the edge, at an open thatched hut. The owner was an outcast, and very dark. One of the cricket people Joseph had talked about, created by centuries of slavery and abuse and bad food. Willie did not think him especially friendly. The thatch of his hut was rough, untrimmed. The hut was about ten feet by ten feet. Half of it was living space and washing-up space; the other half, with a kind of loft, was sleeping space, for calves and hens as well as people.

Willie thought, “It’s pure nature now. Everything I have to do I will do in the bush.”

Later they ate a kind of rice gruel, thick and salty.

Willie thought, “They’ve been living like this for centuries. I have been practising my yoga, so to speak, for a few days, and have become obsessed by it. They have been practising a profounder kind of yoga, every day, every meal. That yoga is their life. And of course there would be days when there would be nothing at all to eat, not even this gruel. Please, let me be granted the strength to bear what I am seeing.”

And for the first time in his life Willie that evening fell asleep in his dirt. He and his guide rested all the next day in the hut while the owner went out to do his work. The next afternoon they began to walk again. They halted at night in another village, and spent the night again in a hut with a calf and hens. They ate rice flakes. There was no tea, no coffee, no hot drink. The water they drank was dirty, from a muddy brook.

Two days later they had left fields and villages behind and were in a teak forest. They came by moonlight that evening to a clearing in the forest. There were low olive-coloured plastic tents around a cleared area. There were no lights, no fires. In the moonlight shadows were black and sharp.

Willie’s guide said, “No talking. No questions.”

They ate quite well that evening, groundnut, rice flakes, and wild meat. In the morning Willie considered his companions. They were not young. They were city people, people who would have had each man his own reason for dropping out of the workaday world and joining the guerrillas.

During the day Willie thought, “Kandapalli preached the Mass Line. Kandapalli wished the villagers and the poor to fight their own battles. I am not among the poor and the villagers in this camp. There has been some mistake. I have fallen among the wrong people. I have come to the wrong revolution. I don’t like these faces. And yet I have to be with them. I have to get a message out to Sarojini or to Joseph. But I don’t know how. I am completely in the hands of these people.”

Two evenings later a rough man in military uniform came to him and said, “Tonight, man from Africa, you will do sentry duty.”

That night Willie cried, tears of rage, tears of fear, and in the dawn the cry of the peacock, after it had drunk from its forest pool, filled him with grief for the whole world.