Magic Seeds

FOUR. SAFE HOUSES

THE MOVEMENT HAD suffered badly from police action in a certain sector, had lost a whole squad, and to take pressure off other squads in that sector the leadership — far off, mysterious — had decided to open a new front in another area which had so far, in the language of guerrilla war, been untroubled.

Until then, for Willie the guerrilla territory had been a series of unconnected landscapes — forest, village, fields, small town. Now as a courier, with Bhoj Narayan as his guide and superior, the landscapes began to join up. He was always on the move, on foot in the villages, in three-wheeler scooters or buses on the high roads, or in trains. He was on no police list as yet; he could travel openly; this was part of his value as a courier. This being on the move pleased him, gave him a feeling of purpose and drama, though he could only intuit the general guerrilla situation. Part of his business as a man who travelled was to give encouragement, to exaggerate the extent of the liberated areas, to suggest that in many areas the war was almost on the point of being won, and required only one last push.

He spent more time in towns and it became possible for him to receive letters from Sarojini. In the towns he also began to eat better food. Strangely, the food in the countryside — where the food was grown — was bad; in the town every day could be a feast day. In the villages, when times were good, the peasant heaped his plate or leaf with grain, and was content to add only flavourings of various sorts; in the towns even poor people ate smaller quantities of grain, and more vegetables and lentils. Because he was eating better Willie became less liable to small illnesses and the depressions they could bring on.

And for the first time since his two weeks in the camp in the teak forest, he began as a courier to get some better idea of the people who were his comrades in the movement. His impressions in the camp had not been good, but now with his deep relationship with Bhoj Narayan, a relationship which in the beginning had not gone well, he controlled his wish to see the flaws in people.

Once every two weeks or so there would be a meeting of senior people from various sectors. Willie helped to arrange these meetings. He was present at many of them. They were usually in a town and they could be risky, since any unusual gathering would have been spotted by the local people and reported to the police. So each man or each couple of men had their own contact in the town, and aimed to arrive at the contact’s house in the early evening, after a journey which could be quite long, could last a day or more, could involve day-long walks on the embankments between fields, away from the dangerous public roads. They came in clothes that would not draw attention. Disguise mattered. The instructions were that on the road they should dress as they might have dressed in the villages. Goatherds or weavers, or people who were pretending to be those things, wore blanket shawls which hid almost everything about a man.

It was from the contact that people found out, when they arrived, where in the town the meeting was to be. Sometimes they went then to the roof of the contact’s house and changed into less sweated clothes; or they changed from workaday country clothes, the local loincloth and the long shirt with big pockets at the sides and the brightly coloured thin towel on the shoulder, to town clothes, trousers and shirt or long tunic. Sometimes, for all their revolutionary talk, they wished to wear trousers to be seen as trousers-people, to give themselves a little more authority with their fellows during the discussions. They took off their rough village slippers once they were inside the meeting house; but their feet remained scratched and marked with deep dirt even after washing and, with the scattering of grubby blanket shawls, gave the gathering a village feel.

People came to the town to talk, to receive instructions, to do their self-criticism sessions. But they also came to eat, to savour the simplest town food, even to taste proper granular salt. And this suppressed simple greed led to an inverted kind of boasting, with people talking competitively of the austerity of their lives in the villages.

At one of his first meetings — in a railway settlement, in a railway house, where the furniture in the main room had been pushed back to the walls, and people were sitting on mattresses and sheets on the floor — Willie heard a pale-complexioned man say, “I have been eating cold rice for the last three days.” Willie didn’t treat this as a friendly conversation starter. He took it literally. He didn’t believe it, disliked the boasting, and he fixed his eyes on the man’s face a little longer than he should. The man noticed, and didn’t like it. He returned Willie’s gaze, hardness for hardness, while continuing to speak to the room. “But that’s no hardship for me. It’s the way I lived as a child.” Willie thought, “Oh, oh. I’ve made an enemy.” He tried afterwards to avoid the man’s gaze, but he was aware all evening of the man’s malevolence growing. The occasion was poisoned for him. He remembered his early distrust of Bhoj Narayan, the way he had judged a man who had never left India by the standards of another country. He didn’t know how to retrieve the situation with the eater of cold rice, and he learned later that evening that the man was the head of a squad, and perhaps a good deal more within the movement, a senior and important man. Willie was only a courier, doing what was thought of as semi-intellectual propaganda work, and on probation; it would be some time before he was admitted to membership of a squad.

Willie thought, “I once unthinkingly said ‘Good question’ to Bhoj Narayan, and for a time earned his hatred. Out of old habit, when this man was talking about eating cold rice, I looked at him more mockingly than I knew. And now he is my enemy. He will want to put me down. Like Bhoj Narayan with some other people, he will want to see the mockery in my eyes replaced by fear.”

His enemy was known as Einstein, and over the next few months Willie picked up various pieces of his story, which was legendary in the movement. He came of a peasant family. A primary school teacher spotted his mathematical talent and pushed him up as far as he could in a country setting. No one in that family had ever had higher education, and immense sacrifices were made, when the time came, to send the young man to a neighbouring small town where he could go to a university. A room, more properly a space six feet by four feet, was rented in the verandah of a washerman’s house for fifteen rupees a month. The smallness of his living space and the tininess of the sums he dealt in were part of the romance of his story.

Einstein’s routine as a student in the washerman’s house was famous. He rose at five, rolled up his bedding, and cleaned out his living space (Willie, old ways clinging to him, didn’t think that could take long). Then he washed his pots and pans (he kept them separate from the washerman’s) and boiled his rice over firewood in the kitchen part of the verandah. Willie noticed in the story that there was no room in Einstein’s student timetable for the gathering of firewood; perhaps on firewood days Einstein was up at four. He ate his rice when it was ready and went to his classes. When he came back in the afternoon he washed his clothes; he had only one suit of clothes. Then he cooked some more food, perhaps rice again, and ate and went to sleep. In between chores he did his studying.

The examinations for the Bachelor of Science degree came. Einstein found that he was at sea with the very first problem of the first paper. His mind went blank. He thought he should write a letter of apology to his father for his failure. He began to write, but then, as he wrote, an entirely novel way of solving the first problem presented itself to him. The rest of the examination came easily to him, and his novel solution of the first problem created a stir in the university. Everybody got to know about the letter of apology out of which, as in a dream, the solution had come; and it began to be said that he was in the great line of Indian twentieth-century mathematical geniuses. This talk, which he encouraged, began at last to affect him. He published a mathematical paper in an Indian journal. It was well received, and he thought that it had fallen to him to correct Einstein. This soon became a mania. He lost his university job and could get no other. He published no other paper. He returned to his village, dropped all the trappings of education (trousers, shirt tucked in, shoes and socks), and dreamed of destroying the world. When the movement appeared, he joined it.

Willie thought, “This man cannot start a revolution. He hates us all. I must make my way to Kandapalli and the other side.”

Then there came to him, at the poste restante of one of the towns he regularly visited, a letter from Sarojini.

Dear Willie, Our father is seriously ill and all his ashram work is suspended. I know you will feel that this is no great loss to the world, but I have begun to have other ideas. The ashram was a creation, say what you will about it. I suppose that is the effect the prospect of death has on us. The other news, which is just as bad, and perhaps even worse from your point of view, is that Kandapalli is not well. He is losing his grip, and nothing is weaker than a revolutionary who is losing his grip. People who admired the strong man and wished to share in his strength run from the weak man. His weakness becomes a kind of moral failing, mocking all his ideas, and that I fear is what is happening to Kandapalli and his followers. I feel I have landed you in a mess. I don’t know whether it is possible for you to get back to Joseph, or whether Joseph himself is part of the problem.

Willie thought, “It is too late now to worry about Joseph and his vicious son-in-law, filling that flat with tension. No one is more vain and vicious than the low wishing to set the record straight. I was worried about that son-in-law as soon as I saw him, with his twisted self-satisfied smile.”

BHOJ NARAYAN SAID one day, “We have an interesting new recruit. He owns a three-wheeler scooter-taxi. He comes of a simple weaver-caste background, but for some reason — perhaps a teacher, perhaps the example of a friend or distant relation, perhaps some insult — he was granted ambition. That’s the kind of person who’s attracted to us. They’ve begun to move, and they find they want to move faster. In the movement we’ve done research on those people. We’ve studied caste patterns in the villages.”

Willie thought, “You are my friend, Bhoj Narayan. But that’s your story too. That’s why you understand him.” And then a little later, not wishing to betray his friend even in thought, this extra idea came to Willie: “Perhaps it’s my story as well. Perhaps that’s where we all are. Perhaps that’s why we are so hard to manage.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “He sought our people out. He invited them to his house and gave them food. When the police repression was bad he offered his house as a hiding place. I think he might be useful in our courier work. We should go and check him out. His story is like Einstein’s, but without the brilliance. He went to a little town to study, but he didn’t get a degree. The family had to call him back to the village. They couldn’t afford the ten or twelve rupees’ rent for a space in the town, or the twenty or thirty rupees for the boy’s food. It’s pathetic. It makes you want to cry. He suffered when he went back to the village. He had got too used to town life. Do you know what town life was for him? It was going to a little tea shop or hotel and having a coffee and a cigarette in the morning. It was going to a half-rupee seat in a rough little cinema. It was wearing shoes and socks. It was wearing trousers and tucking in his shirt and walking like a man, not flopping about with country slippers and inside a long shirt. When he went back to the family’s weaver-caste house in the village he lost all of that at one blow. He had nothing to do. He wasn’t going to be a weaver. And he was bored out of his mind. You know what he said? ‘In the village it’s pure nature, not even a transistor.’ Just the long, empty days and the longer nights. In the end he got a bank loan and bought a scooter-taxi. At least it got him out of the village. But really it was his boredom that brought him to us. Once you learn about boredom in the village you are ready to be a revolutionary.”

One afternoon a week or so later Willie and Bhoj Narayan went to the scooter-man’s village. This wasn’t a village of uneven thatched roofs and dirt roads, the village of popular imagination. The roads were paved and the roofs were of local red curved tiles. Weavers were a backward caste, and the dalit or backward-caste area of the village began at a bend in the main village lane, but if you didn’t know it was a dalit area you would have missed it. The houses were like those that had gone before. The weavers sat in the late-afternoon shade in the yards in front of their houses and spun yarn into thread. The looms were in the houses; through open front doors people could be seen working them. It was an unhurried scene of some beauty; it was hard to imagine that this spinning and weaving, which looked so much like some precious protected folk craft, was done only for the village, for the very poor, and was a desperate business for the people concerned, run on very narrow margins. The spinning wheels were home-assembled, with old bicycle rims for the main wheels; every other part seemed to be made from twigs and twine and looked frail, ready to snap.

The scooter-man’s scooter was in his front yard, next to a spinning wheel. He lived with his brother and his brother’s family and the house was larger than the average. The two bedrooms were on the left, the rooms with the looms were on the right. The rooms were no more than ten or twelve feet deep, so that you were hardly in the house when you were out of it. At the back of the house on one side was the open kitchen and a large basket with corn cobs, bought for fuel. On the other side was the outhouse. Some richer person’s field came right up to the plot, right up to where the scooter-man’s brother had planted a fine-leaved tree, as yet quite small and slender, which in a couple of seasons would be cut down and used as fuel.

Space: how it always pressed, how in all the openness it always became minute. Willie was unwilling to work out the living arrangements of the house. He imagined there would be some kind of loft in each of the bedrooms. And he understood how, to a young man who had known the comparative freedom of a small town, to be reduced to the small space of this weaver’s house, and to have nothing to do, would be a kind of death.

They brought out low benches for Willie and Bhoj Narayan, and with ancient courtesies, as though they were very rich, they offered tea. Old deprivation showed on the face of the wife of the brother. Her cheeks were sunken and she looked about forty, though she could have been no more than twenty-five or twenty-eight. But Willie at the same time was moved to notice the care with which the brother’s wife had dressed for the occasion, in a new sari of muted colours, grey and black in a small oblong pattern, with a fringe of gold.

The scooter-man was beside himself with pleasure to have Willie and Bhoj Narayan in his house. He spoke a little too freely of his admiration for the movement, and from time to time Willie noticed a kind of disturbance in the brother’s eyes.

Willie thought, “There’s a little trouble here. Perhaps it’s the difference in ages, perhaps it’s the difference in education. One brother has been a trousers-man and has learned boredom. The older brother hasn’t. He or his wife may feel that they are sinking too deep in something they don’t understand.”

Afterwards, when Bhoj Narayan asked Willie, “What do you think?” Willie said, “Raja is all right.” Raja was the name of the scooter-man. “But I am not so sure of the brother or the brother’s wife. They are frightened. They don’t want trouble. They just want to do their weaving work and earn their four hundred rupees a month. How much do you think Raja borrowed from the bank for his scooter?”

“A scooter costs about seventy or seventy-five thousand rupees. That’s new. Raja’s scooter would have cost a good deal less. He’s probably borrowed thirty or forty thousand. The bank wouldn’t have given him more.”

“The elder brother probably thinks about that every night. He probably believes that Raja is over-educated and has got above himself and is heading for a fall.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “They adore Raja. They are very proud of him. They will do what he wants them to do.”

TWO OR THREE times a month they called out Raja to do some work for the movement. He took Willie or Bhoj Narayan or some others to where they had to go in a hurry. And, having this facility now, Willie went often to the post office in small towns, to check his poste restante letters from Germany. They got to know Willie in these post offices; they didn’t always ask him to show his passport. That had seemed to him charming, the Indian friendliness people spoke about; it occurred to him only later to be worried.

And then, after some months, Raja began to ferry supplies, with Willie or Bhoj Narayan, or on his own. There was a space below the passenger seat of the scooter, and it was also easy to fit a false floor. The pick-up and drop-off points always changed; it was understood they were only stages in a kind of relay. Bhoj Narayan acted as a coordinator; he knew a little more than Willie, but even he didn’t know everything. Supplies, mainly weapons, were being assembled for a new front somewhere. After all its recent losses the movement was cautious. It was using many couriers, each courier being used only once or twice a month; and supplies were being sent in small quantities, so that discovery or accident would result only in a small local loss, nothing to alter the larger plan.

Raja said to Willie one day, “Have you ever seen the police headquarters? Shall we go, just to have a look?”

“Why not?”

It had never occurred to Willie to go looking for the adversary. He had lived for too long now with his disconnected landscapes, his disconnected duties, with no true idea of the results of his actions. It hadn’t occurred to him that this other, well-mapped view of the area was also open to him, would be as easy as opening a book. And when they were on the main road, heading for the district headquarters, it was for a while like returning to an earlier, whole life.

The landscape acquired a friendlier feel. The neem and flamboyant shade trees beside the road, though for stretches the line of trees was broken, spoke of some old idea of benevolence that was still living on. The road acquired another feel, the feel of the working world, with the pleasures of that world — the truck stops with big painted signs, the cola advertisements, the smoky black kitchens at the back with earthen fireplaces on high platforms, and the brightly painted plastic tables and chairs (everything painted the colour of the cola advertisements) in the dusty yards at the front — so different in mood and promise from the self-sacrificing pleasures Willie had been living with for more than a year. Where there was water there were friendly small fields of paddy, maize, tobacco, cotton, sometimes potatoes, sometimes peppers. The fields of the liberated areas Willie knew had fallen into ruin: the old landlords and feudals had run away years before from the guerrilla chaos, and no secure new order had been established.

It was easy for Willie to return to old ways of feeling, and it was a shock when they came to the district headquarters, to the police area at one end of the little town, in a terrible noise of twenty or thirty taxi-scooters like Raja’s, and in a brown-blue billow of exhaust smoke, to see the stained old sandbags (speaking of sun and rain and sun again) and machine guns and the crumpled, much-used uniforms of the Central Reserve Police Force outside police headquarters, uniforms that spoke of a deadly seriousness: to see this effect of the disconnected things he had been doing, to understand in a new way that lives were at stake. The police parade ground, perhaps also the playing ground, was sandy; the kerbstones of the roads within, the camp roads, were newly whitewashed; the shade trees were big and old: like the rest of that police area, they would have had a history: they probably came from the British time. Raja, shouting above the screech and scrape of scooters, excitedly told Willie where in the main two-storeyed building the police commissioner’s rooms were, where the police guest rooms were, and where elsewhere in the compound, at one side of the parade or playing ground, the police welfare buildings were.

Willie was not excited. He was thinking, with a sinking heart, “When they were telling me about what the guerrillas were doing, I should have asked about the police. I never should have allowed myself to believe that there was only one side in this battle. I don’t know how we make mistakes like that. But we do.”

Not long after this Raja was admitted to a training camp. He stayed for a month, then went back to his scooter work.

It was then that things began to go wrong for him.

Bhoj Narayan said to Willie one day, “It’s terrible to say, but I think we are having trouble with Raja. Both his last deliveries of supplies were captured by the police just where he deposited them.”

Willie said, “It might be an accident. And possibly the people who received them were to blame.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “I have another reading. I feel the police have been bribing his elder brother. Perhaps bribing both brothers. Thirty thousand rupees is a big debt.”

“Let us leave it for the time being. Let us not use him.”

“We’ll do that.”

Two weeks later Bhoj Narayan said, “It’s as I feared. Raja wants to leave the movement. We can’t allow that. He’d have us all picked up. I think we’ll have to go and see him. I have told him we are coming to talk it over. We should aim to get there just when the sun sets. We’ll take another scooter.”

The sky was red and gold. The few big trees about the weavers’ area were black. In a house about a hundred yards away there was a cooking fire. It was the house of a family who made bidi leaf-cigarettes. If they rolled a thousand cigarettes a day they made forty rupees. This meant they made twice as much as a weaver for a day’s work.

Bhoj Narayan said to Raja and his brother, “I think we should go inside the house.”

When they went in the elder brother said, “I asked him to leave. I didn’t want him to get killed. If he gets killed we will have to sell the scooter. We will make a loss on that and we will still have to pay off the debt to the bank. I wouldn’t be able to do it. My children will become paupers.”

The elder brother’s wife, who on the previous occasion had worn her best sari, with the gold fringe, but was now wearing only a peasant woman’s skirt, said, “Maim him, sir. Take away an arm or a leg. He will still be able to sit at a loom and do something. Please don’t kill him. We will become beggars if you do.” She sat on the floor and held Bhoj Narayan’s legs.

Willie thought, “The more she begs and pleads, the angrier he will get. He wants to see the fear in the man’s eyes.”

And when the shot was fired, and Raja’s head became a mess, the elder brother’s eyes popped as he stared at the ground. That was how they left him, the elder brother, staring and pop-eyed next to the home-made looms.

All the way back to their base they were grateful for the stutter of the scooter.

A week later, when they met face-to-face again, Bhoj Narayan said, “Give it six months. In my experience that’s what it takes.”

FOR SOME WEEKS afterwards Willie marvelled at himself. He thought, “When I first met Bhoj Narayan I didn’t like him. I was uneasy with him. And then somehow when we were together in the street of the tanners, and I was very low, I found a companionship with him. That companionship was necessary to me. It helped me through a bad patch, when I was sinking into old ways of feeling, old ways of wishing to run away, and that feeling of companionship is now what is uppermost when I think of him. I know that the other Bhoj Narayan, the man I distrusted, is still there, but now I have to look very hard for him. The later man is the man I know and understand. I know how he thinks and why he does what he does. I carry the scene in the house with the looms in my head. I see the scooter in the yard next to the spinning wheel with the old bicycle rim. I see that poor elder brother with the popping eyes, and understand his pain. And yet I do not think I will willingly betray Bhoj Narayan to anyone. I do not think there is any point. I haven’t worked out why I feel there is no point. I could say various things about justice and people on the other side. But it wouldn’t be true. The fact is I have arrived at a new way of feeling. And it is amazing that it should have happened just after fourteen or fifteen months of this strange life. The first night, in the camp in the teak forest, I was disturbed by the faces of the new recruits. Later I was disturbed by the faces at the meetings in the safe houses. I feel I understand them all now.”

THEY WENT ON with the slow, careful labour of taking supplies to where a new front was to be opened, working like ants digging out a nest in the ground or taking leaf fragments to that nest, each worker content and important with his minute task, carrying a speck of earth or a bitten-off scrap of a leaf.

Bhoj Narayan and Willie went to a small railway town to check that the deliveries there were secure. This town was one of the places where Willie picked up his poste restante letters. He had last visited it with Raja, and had had the feeling then — from the too familiar, too friendly clerk — that he had been overdoing the trips to the post office in Raja’s scooter and had been making himself too noticeable there as the man who got letters from Germany. Until then he had thought of the poste restante as quite safe; very few people even knew of the facility. But now he had a feeling of foreboding. He examined all the dangers that might be connected with the poste restante; he dismissed them all. But the foreboding remained. He thought, “This is because of Raja. This is how a bad death lays a curse on us.”

The railway workers’ colony was an old settlement, from the 1940s perhaps, of flat-roofed two-roomed and three-roomed concrete houses set down tightly together in dirt roads without sanitation. It might have been presented at the time as a work of social conscience, a way of doing low-cost housing, and it might just about have looked passable in the idealising fine line (and fine lettering) of the architect’s elevation. Thirty-five years on, the thing created was awful. Concrete had grown dingy, black for two or three feet above ground; window frames and doors had been partially eaten away. There were no trees, no gardens, only in some houses little hanging pots of basil, an herb associated with religion and used in some religious rites. There were no sitting areas or playing areas or washing areas or clothes-drying areas; and what had once been clean and straight and bare in the architect’s drawing was now full of confused lines, electric wires thick and thin dipping from one leaning pole to the next, and the confusion was fully peopled: people compelled here by their houses to live out of doors in all seasons; as though you could do anything with people here, give them anything to live in, fit them in anywhere.

The safe house was in one of the back streets. It seemed perfect cover.

Bhoj Narayan said, “Stay about a hundred feet behind me.”

And Willie dawdled, his heels slipping off the smooth leather of his village sandals and trailing on the dirt of the street.

Some scrawny boys were playing a rough kind of cricket with a very dirty tennis ball, a bat improvised from the central rib of a coconut branch, and a box for a wicket. Willie saw four or five balls bowled: there was no style or true knowledge of the game.

Willie caught up with Bhoj Narayan at the house.

Bhoj Narayan said, “There’s no one there.”

They went around to the back. Bhoj Narayan banged on the flimsy door, which was rotten at the bottom where rain had splashed on it for many seasons. It would have been easy to kick it in. But sharp, acrid voices from three houses at the back called out to them: women and men sitting in the narrow shadow of their houses.

Bhoj Narayan said, “I am looking for my brother-in-law. His father is in hospital.”

A wretchedly thin woman in a green sari that showed up all her bones said, “There’s no one there. Some people came for him one morning and he went away with them.”

Bhoj Narayan asked, “When was that?”

The woman said, “Two weeks ago. Three weeks.”

Bhoj Narayan said under his breath to Willie, “I think we should get out of here.” To the woman he said, “We have to take the message to other relatives.”

They walked back through the parody of the cricket game.

Bhoj Narayan said, “We are still paying for Raja. Everybody he got to know with us is compromised. I let my guard down, I liked him so much. We have to give up this town. We are being watched even as we walk here.”

Willie said, “I don’t think it was Raja. It might have been Raja’s brother, and he didn’t really know what he was doing.”

“Raja or Raja’s brother, we ’ve taken a bad knock. We ’ve lost a year’s work. Lakhs of rupees in weapons. We were building up a squad here. Heaven knows what has happened in other sectors.”

They walked away from the railway colony to the older town.

Willie said, “I would like to go to the post office. There might be a letter from my sister. And since we are not coming back here this might be my last chance for a while to hear from her.”

The post office was a small, much-decorated British-built stone building. It had ochre or magnolia walls edged with raised masonry painted red; it had deep, low stone eaves in the Indian style; and a semi-circular stone or masonry panel at the top of the façade gave the date 1928. Obliquely opposite across the thoroughfare was a tea shop.

Willie said, “Let’s have a tea or a coffee.”

When the coffee came Willie said, “I have to tell you this. I have become nervous of the post office. I came here too often with Raja. You know how he was. Itchy feet. He always wanted to be on the road. I would come here even when I knew that there wouldn’t be a letter from my sister. You could say that sometimes I came with Raja only for the company and the ride. The clerk became friendly. It was nice in the beginning, being known. Then it worried me.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “I will go for you.”

He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down, and made his way across the bright road to the post office doorway, dark below the low stone eaves. He was swallowed up in the gloom and at the same time Willie saw four or five men in varying costumes detaching themselves from the fixed postures in which they had been sitting around the dark mouth of the post office. A second later these men, all together now, were hurrying Bhoj Narayan to what had looked like a taxi but now showed itself to be an unmarked police car.

After the car drove away Willie paid for the coffee and crossed the bright road to the poste restante counter. The clerk was new.

He said to the clerk, “What was all that about?”

The clerk said, with his too-formal English, “Some malefactor. The police were waiting for him for a week.”

Willie said, “Can I buy stamps at this counter?”

“You do that at the front.”

Willie thought, “I must leave. I must leave fast. I must go to the railway station. I have to go back to the base as fast as I can.”

And then, with every new thought that came during his fast walk in the afternoon sun, he understood his predicament more and more clearly. Sarojini’s letter would now be in the hands of the police. Perhaps earlier letters as well. Everything was now known about him. He was now on the police list. He no longer had the protection of anonymity. And it was only many minutes later, after he had digested these new facts about himself, that he began to live again those very simple two or three minutes of Bhoj Narayan’s walk and capture. It was Bhoj Narayan’s boast that he knew how to study a street, to see who didn’t belong. The gift had failed him at the end. Or he hadn’t thought to use it. Perhaps he hadn’t understood the danger. Perhaps he had been too disturbed by what had happened before in the railway colony.

At the railway station he saw from the dust-blown, faded black-and-white boards that the next train going in the direction he wished to go was an express and not a passenger train. Passenger trains were slow, stopping at all the stations on the way. The express train would take him many miles beyond where he would normally get off. It would commit him to walking at night through villages and across fields, exciting dogs in villages and birds in open areas, being always at the centre of a great commotion; or he would have to ask at some peasant’s or outcast’s hut at the edge of a village to be put up for the night, and take his chance in an open shed, with the chickens and the calves.

The express train was due in just over an hour. The idle thought came to him that the Rolex on his wrist would give him away to anyone on the lookout for a fugitive with German connections. Then that simulated anxiety became real, and he began to wonder whether he had been followed from the town, whether some expert police street-watcher hadn’t spotted him as an intruder, not a local, in the tea shop opposite the post office.

There was a way at ground level over the tracks to the platform at the other side. This way was busy. There was also an old timber bridge, with a walkway between high half-walls (high, perhaps, to prevent people throwing themselves in front of trains). There were only half a dozen people there. They were young people; they were on the bridge for the adventure and the view. Willie went and stood with them and, knowing that only his head and shoulders showed, tried to become a watcher of crowds. In no time he was fascinated, seeing how unselfconscious people were in their movements, how unique each man’s movements were, and how much of the person they revealed.

He saw nothing to worry him, and when the express came in, and the crowd appeared to roar, and the hucksters put an extra edge into their cries that lifted them above the general roar, he ran down and forced himself into a third-class compartment that was already quite packed. The open windows had horizontal metal bars; there was fine blown dust everywhere; everything was warm, and everyone smelled of old clothes and tobacco. When the express moved off again into the sunlight he thought, “Luck has been with me. And for the first time here I have been on my own.”

Not far from the passenger-train halt where he would have preferred to get off, the track had a sharp bend. Even express trains slowed down there, and Willie, feeling that luck was now with him, was planning to jump off the express at that point, to save himself a long night’s march in unfamiliar territory. That point was about two hours away.

He thought, “I am on my own. Bhoj Narayan is no longer with me. I suppose I will have a rough time with some people now.”

He considered the people in his compartment. They would have been like the poor Bhoj Narayan and his family had risen out of in two or three generations. All that work and ambition had now been wasted; all that further possibility had been thrown away. He had told Bhoj Narayan, when they had talked of these things a long time before, and before they had become friends, that Bhoj Narayan’s family story was a success story. But Bhoj Narayan had not replied, had not appeared to hear. The same was true, though in a much smaller way, of Raja’s upward movement from the weaver caste. That, too, was full of further possibility, and that, too, had come to nothing. What was the point of those lives? What was the point of what could be seen as those two suicides?

Many minutes later, a little nearer the jumping-off point when the track curved, Willie thought, “I am wrong. I am looking at it from my own point of view. Everything was the point for Bhoj Narayan. He felt himself to be a man. That was what the movement and even his suicide — if we think of it like that — gave him.”

And then a little later, almost before he jumped, Willie thought, “But that is romantic and wrong. It takes much more to be a man. Bhoj Narayan was choosing a short cut.”

The express slowed down, to about ten miles an hour. Willie jumped onto the steep embankment and allowed himself to roll down.

The daylight was going. But Willie knew where he was. He had a walk of three miles or so to a village and a hut, more a farmhouse, whose owner he knew very well. The monsoon was over, but now, as if out of spite, it began to rain. Those three miles took a long time. Still, it could have been worse. If courage had not come to him, and he hadn’t jumped off the train at that dangerous steep bend, he would have been taken many extra miles to where the express stopped: a day’s journey on foot, at least.

It was just before eight when he came to the village. There were no lights. People went to sleep early here; nights were long. The village street ran along the mud-and-wattle front wall of Shivdas’s high farmhouse. Willie shook the low door and called. Presently Shivdas called back, and soon, wearing almost nothing, a very dark and tall and gaunt man, he opened the low door and let Willie into the kitchen, which was at the front of the house, behind the mud-and-wattle street wall. The thatch was black and grainy from years of cooking smoke.

Shivdas said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Willie said, “There’s been an emergency. Bhoj Narayan has been arrested.”

Shivdas took the news calmly. He said, “Come, dry yourself. Some tea? Some rice?”

He called to someone in the next room, and there was movement there. Willie knew what that movement meant: Shivdas was asking his wife to give up their bed to the visitor. It was what Shivdas did on such occasions. The courtesy came instinctively to him. He and his wife then left the thatched main house and moved to the low, open, tile-covered rooms at the side of the courtyard at the back, where their children slept.

Less than an hour later, lying in Shivdas’s bed below the high, black, cool thatch, in a warm smell of old clothes and tobacco which was like the smell of the third-class railway compartment of just a couple of hours before, Willie thought, “We think, or they think, that Shivdas does what he does because he is a peasant revolutionary, someone created by the movement, someone new and very precious. But Shivdas does what he does because he is instinctively following old ideas, old ways, old courtesies. One day he will not give up his bed to me. He will not think he needs to. That will be the end of the old world and the end of the revolution.”