Magic Seeds

SIX. THE END OF KANDAPALLI

AFTER TWO ANXIOUS days they came again to the village with the lord’s abandoned mansion, the lord’s abandoned straw-coloured fields (with the vivid green of fast-growing parasitic vines), and the orchards where branches had outgrown their strength, where starved-looking leaves, not the right colour, were few on spindly crusted twigs, and fruit was scattered and deceptive, with wasps making nests within the rotted, grey-white skins of sweet limes and lemons.

It was a different village for them. They had been stars for the two weeks they had been there. They had had guns and uniforms and peaked caps with the star the colour of blood, and their words had mattered (even if no one had really believed in them). Now that had changed; all the village knew about the police ambush and the death of the menacing squad commander. With no particular aggression, merely going about the small details of day-to-day village life with the self-righteous intensity of men who knew what was what, the villagers seemed to see through the returning men in uniform.

They looked for the three men they had left behind to organise the takeover of the lord’s land. It seemed staggering now, that they should have thought of attempting such a thing. It must have been awful for the three men. No one in the village knew where they were. No one even seemed to remember them. And it soon became clear to the remnant of Willie’s squad and Keso, the fat, dark stand-in commander, a failed medical student, that these men had deserted. Keso knew about desertions.

They had been given the use of huts when they had occupied and liberated the village. Now Keso thought it would have been wrong to ask and perhaps even dangerous to spend the night in the village. He ordered that they should continue on their march, doing what Ramachandra had said, going back the way they had come, stage by stage, to base.

Keso said, “You can’t help feeling that Ramachandra was right. We would have achieved a lot more if we had killed a few of these people whenever we liberated a village. We would also have been safer now.”

They didn’t know the forest well enough to stay away from the paths and avoid the villages. They began to think of the villagers as enemies, though they depended on them for water and food. Every night they camped half a mile or so outside a village; every night (with a remnant of their very rough military training) they posted an armed member of the squad as a sentry. That fact became known about them; it saved them from being looted by certain village people.

On the way out, Willie now realised, and during all his time with the movement, he had lived with the pastoral vision of the countryside and forest that was the basis of the movement’s thinking. He had persuaded himself that that was the countryside he saw; he had never questioned it. He had persuaded himself that outside the noise and rush and awfulness of cities was this quite different world where things followed an antique course, which it was the business of the revolution to destroy. This pastoral vision contained the idea that the peasant laboured and was oppressed. What this pastoral vision didn’t contain was the idea that the village — like those they had liberated on the march (and then let go of) and might one day with luck liberate again — was full of criminals, as limited and vicious and brutal as the setting, whose existence had nothing to do with the idea of labour and oppression.

Willie wondered how on the way out he had failed to see these village criminals. Perhaps Ramachandra, with his bony nervous fingers on his AK-47, had caused them to lie low. Now in every village the depleted squad was beset and provoked by criminals. In one village there was a pale-complexioned man on a horse and with a gun — how could they have ever missed him? — who came to their evening camp and shouted, “You are CIA, CIA. You should be shot.” Keso decided that they shouldn’t respond. It was the best thing to do, but it wasn’t easy. The man on horseback was a village thug, acting up for the village, making a show of the fearlessness which a while before he had preferred to hide.

In some villages there were people who had got it into their heads that the squad were travelling gunmen who could be hired to kill an enemy. The people who wanted someone killed usually didn’t have money, but they thought they could nag or cajole the men into doing what they wanted. Perhaps this was how they lived, begging for favours in everything. This way of life showed in their wild eyes and wasted bodies.

Willie remembered one of the things Ramachandra used to say: “We must give up the idea of remaking everybody. Too many people are too far gone for that. We have to wait for this generation to die out. This generation and the next. We must plan for the generation after that.”

So stage by stage they went back, for Willie the vision of pastoral undoing itself, as if by a kind of magic. Roads that had been made by the squad with the help of villagers had disappeared; water tanks that had been cleared of mud had become clogged again. Family disputes, infinitely petty, about land or bore-wells or inheritances, that had been brought to Ramachandra as squad leader for his adjudication, and appeared to have been set right by him, raged again; at least one murder had occurred.

One day, outside a village, a dark middle-aged man came up to the marching squad. He said to Keso, “How long have you been in the movement?” And it was as if he had spoken merely to let them hear his beautiful educated voice and understand that, in spite of his peasant clothes and the thin towel-scarf over his shoulders, he was a townsman.

Keso said, “Eight years.”

The stranger said, “When I meet people like you — and I do meet people like you from time to time — I can’t help thinking that you are only captains and majors. Beginners, on the first rung of ascension. Don’t mind it. I have been in the movement, in all the movements if you prefer, for thirty years, and I see no reason why I can’t go on for another thirty. If you are on your toes all the time you can’t be caught. That’s why I think of myself as a general. Or, if you think that is too boastful, a brigadier.”

Willie said, “How do you spend your time?”

“Avoiding capture, of course. Apart from that I am intensely bored. But in the middle of this boredom the soul never fails to sit in judgement on the world and never fails to find it worthless. It is not an easy thing to explain to outsiders. But it keeps me going.”

Willie said, “How did you start?”

“In the classical way. I was at the university. I wished to see how the poor lived. There was a certain amount of excited talk about them among the students. A scout for the movement — there were dozens of them around — arranged for me to see the poor. We met at a railway station and travelled through the night in a third-class coach on a very slow train. I was like a tourist, and my guide was like a travel courier. We came at last to our poor village. It was very poor. It never occurred to me to ask why my guide had chosen this particular village or how the movement had found it. There was no sanitation, of course. That seemed a big thing then. And there was very little food. My guide put questions to people and translated their replies for me. One woman said, ‘There has been no fire in my house for three days.’ She meant she hadn’t cooked for three days and she and her family hadn’t eaten for three days. I was immensely excited. At the end of that first evening the villagers sat around a fire in the open and sang songs. Whether they were doing that for us or for themselves, whether they did it every evening, I never thought to ask. All I knew was that I passionately wished to join the movement. The movement of the time, the movement of thirty years ago. That was arranged for me by my guide. It took time. I left the university and went to a small town. I was met by contacts. They said they were posting me to a particular village. It was a long walk from the small town. The main road became a dirt road, and then night came. It was March, so it was quite pleasant, not hot. I was not frightened. And then I came to the village. It was not too late. As soon as I saw the village I saw the house of the big landlord. It was a big house with a neat thatched roof. The poor people didn’t have neat thatched roofs. Their eaves were untrimmed. That big landlord was the man I had to kill. It was quite remarkable, on my very first day seeing the house of the man I had to kill. Seeing it just like that. If I was another kind of person I would have thought it was the hand of God. Setting me on my path. Those were my instructions, to get the big landlord killed. I wasn’t to kill him myself. I was to get some peasant to do it. That was the ideology of the time, to turn the peasants into rebels, and through them to start the revolution. And, would you believe, just after seeing the house, in the darkness, I saw a peasant coming back from his work, late for some reason. Again, the hand of God. I introduced myself to the peasant. I said straight out, ‘Good evening, brother. I am a revolutionary. I need shelter for the night.’ He called me sir and invited me to his hut. When we got there he offered me his cowshed. It is the classic story of the revolution. It was a terrible cowshed, though now I have seen many much worse. We had some dreadful rice. The water came from a little stream. Not some storybook purling English stream, clear as crystal. This is India, my masters, and this was a dreadful muddy runnel. You had to boil whatever you could wring out of the smelly mess. I talked to my host about his poverty and his debt and the hardness of his life. He seemed surprised. I then invited him to kill his landlord. I was pushing it, don’t you think? My first night and everything. My peasant simply said no. I actually was quite relieved. I wasn’t hardened enough. I would have wanted to run away if the man had said, ‘What a good idea, sir. It’s been on my mind for some time. Come and watch me knife the bastard.’ What my peasant said was that he depended on his landlord for food and money for three months. To kill the landlord, he said, giving me some of his own wisdom in exchange for my theories, would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. His speech was full of sayings like that. I ran away as soon as I could the next morning. It’s a classic revolutionary story. Most people would have gone back to the town and taken a bus or train home, and gone back to their studies and to screwing the servant girls. But I persevered. And here you see me, thirty years later. Still going among the peasants with that philosophy of murder.”

Willie said, “How do you spend the day?”

Keso said, “It was what I was going to ask him.”

“I am in somebody’s hut. I have spent the night there. No worries about rent and insurance and utilities. I get up early and go to the fields to do my stuff. I have got used to it now. I doubt whether I could go back to sitting in a little room with four walls. I go back to the hut, have a little of the peasant’s food. I read for a while. The classics: Marx, Trotsky, Mao, Lenin. Afterwards I visit various people in the village, arranging a meeting for some future date. I return. My host comes from the fields. We chat. Actually, we don’t. It’s hard to talk. We don’t have anything to say to one another. You can’t make yourself part of the life of the village. After another day or two I am off. I don’t want my host to get tired of me and tip off the police. In this way every day flows past, and every day is like every other day. I feel the life I am describing is similar to that of a high-powered executive.”

Willie said, “I don’t understand that.”

Keso said, “I don’t understand it either.”

The stranger said, “I mean the boredom. Everything is laid out for them. Once you get into those outfits you are all right for life. British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Unilever, Metal Box. They tell me that at Imperial the big boys just have lunch and go around checking the dates on cigarette packs in the shops.”

He had become agitated at the hint of distrust, and he spoke defensively. A little of his rhetorical style had gone. He didn’t wish now to stay with the squad, and as soon as he could — at the sight of a cluster of huts where he might go and rest — he excused himself.

Keso said, “Do you think he ever worked in one of those big companies?”

Willie said, “I feel he might have applied and failed. Probably if they had taken him at Metal Box or one of the others he would never have come out to the countryside and started asking peasants to kill people. That thing he said about captains and majors and being himself a general, that probably tells us that he tried for the army and the army didn’t want him. I’m a little angry with him.”

“That’s extreme.”

“I am angry with him because at first I thought that in spite of his clowning manner there was some wisdom in him, something I could use. I was listening very carefully, thinking that later on I would work out everything he was saying.”

Keso said, “He’s mad. I think he’s never been arrested because the police don’t think it is worth their while. The peasants probably think he is a joke.”

Willie thought, “But probably we are all like that to the villagers. Probably without knowing it we’ve all become a little mad or unbalanced. Keso would have liked to be a doctor. Now he lives this life and tries to tell himself it is real. It’s always easy to see the other man’s strangeness. We can see the madness of those villagers who wanted us to kill people for them. Those men with the badly made, twisted faces, as though they had literally had a terrible time being born. We can’t see our own strangeness. Though I have begun to feel my own.”

THEY CAME AT LAST to the base, where Willie had a room of his own. The wish of the high command to extend the liberated areas had failed; everyone knew that. But in spite of the general gloom Willie was happy to be in a place where he had already been. He felt he had ceased to be flung into space; he felt he might once again come to possess himself. He liked the low clean thatched roof — so protecting, especially when he was on his string bed — where he could store small things between the thatch and the rafters; he liked the plastered beaten-earth floor, hollow-sounding below his feet.

Willie was hoping to see the section leader again, the man with the soft, educated manner. But he was not around. The news was that he had deserted, had surrendered to the police after elaborate negotiations. He had claimed the bounty that had been offered for his arrest; guerrillas who surrendered could claim this bounty. Then he had made his way back to the big city from which he had come. There, for some days, he had stalked his estranged wife before shooting her dead. No one knew where he was now. Perhaps he had killed himself; more likely, with the freedom of movement his bounty would have given him, he was at large in the immense country, using all his guerrilla’s skill for disguise and concealment, and was perhaps even now shedding his old personality and the pain he had carried for years.

The news would have made a greater stir if at about the same time the police hadn’t arrested Kandapalli. That was by far the bigger event, though Kandapalli had now lost most of his following and was so little a security risk that the police took no special precautions when they arrested him or when they took him to court. What was most notable about him was the clippings book he carried with him all the time. In this book he had pasted newspaper photographs of children. There was some profound cause for emotion there, in the photographs of children, but Kandapalli couldn’t say; his mind had gone; all that was left him was this great emotion. Willie was profoundly moved, more moved than he had been in Berlin when he had first heard of Kandapalli from Sarojini: his passion for humanity, his closeness to tears. There was no means of being in touch with her now, and for some days, in a helpless kind of grief, which held grief for himself and the world, and every person and every animal who had been wounded, Willie tried to enter the mind of the deranged man. He tried to imagine the small old schoolteacher choosing pictures from the newspapers and pasting them in his book. What pictures would have attracted him, and why? But the man eluded him, remained a prisoner of his mind, forever in solitary confinement. The thought of the derangement of the mind, where no one could now reach him, the unimaginable twists and turns from present to past, was more affecting than news of the death of the man would have been.

Even enemies of the man were moved. Einstein thought that the movement should make some gesture, to show solidarity with the old revolutionary. He brought the matter up at the formal meeting of the section.

He said, “His disgrace disgraces us all. We have quarrelled with him, but we owe it to him to do something. We owe it to him for reviving the movement at a bad time, when it had been crushed and was all but dead. I propose that we kidnap a minister of the central government or, if that is beyond us, a minister of the local state. We will make it clear that we are doing it as a gesture in support of Kandapalli. I volunteer myself for the action. I have done some research. I have a certain man in mind, and I know when it can be done. All I need are three men and three pistols and a car. I will need another man to stand at the traffic lights near the minister’s house and to stop the cross-traffic for three or four seconds while we are making our getaway. This man will make believe he is doing it for the minister. The action itself should take no more than two minutes. I have actually done a dry run, and that took one minute and fifty seconds.”

An important squad leader said, “We shouldn’t do anything more at the present time to encourage the police to come down harder on us. But please outline your plan.”

“The minister’s house is at Aziznagar. We need to be there a week in advance, or four days at least, to get used to the layout of the streets. We will need a car. We will hire it from somewhere else. Three of us will sit in the car in the morning just outside the gates. The minister’s house is hidden from the street by a high wall. Perfect for us. A guard will come and ask us what we are doing. We will mark this guard down as the man to deal with when the time comes. We will say we are students from college — I will find out which one to say — and we want to ask the minister to come and talk to us or something like that. I will judge when the crowd is thinning and the time is ripe. I will get out of the car and walk past the guard to the minister’s front door. As I walk one of the men with me will shoot the guard in the hand or the foot. I will now be in the minister’s house. I will shoot anyone who is in my way. I will burst into the minister’s office or greeting room with a great deal of noise and shouting. I will shoot at his hand, rapid fire, shouting all the time. He will be very frightened. As soon as he is wounded I will hustle him out of the front door to the car blocking the gate. I have studied his physique. I can do it. I can hustle him out. All this has to be done with coolness and precision and determination. There will be no hesitation at any stage. We drive past the traffic lights, which will be fixed for us. Two minutes. Two bold, cool minutes. The action will be good for us. It will tell people we are still around.”

The squad leader said, “It’s nice and simple. Perhaps too simple.”

Einstein said, “The most effective things are simple and direct.”

Keso said, “I am worried about the traffic lights. Wouldn’t it be better to put them out of action?”

Einstein said, “Too early, and they’ll fix them. Too late, and there’ll be a jam at the intersection. Better someone walking to the intersection, if the lights are against us when we appear, and this person, very cool, pulling on official-looking white gloves and stopping the cross-traffic. If the lights are with us we have to do nothing at all.”

The squad leader said, “Is there a policeman or a police box at the intersection?”

Einstein said, “I wouldn’t have wanted to do it if there was a police box. When we have passed, this person will walk calmly to the other side of the road, taking off his gloves, and will get into a car or a taxi, which will then leave the scene. So perhaps we will need a second car. If anyone at all notices they will think it’s another Indian street joker. Four men, two cars, three pistols.”

Keso said, “I feel you are determined to do this, whatever we say.”

Einstein said, “I think it will be a challenging thing to do. And it will be unexpected, since we have nothing against this particular minister. I like the unexpectedness. I think it will set an example to our people. Too many of us, when we plan a military action, can think only in the most banal way. So the other side are always waiting for us, and we fill the jails.”

Afterwards Einstein and Willie talked.

Einstein said, “I hear you had a rough time during that push into the interior. Extending the liberation area. The strategy was poor, and some people paid the price. We spread ourselves too thinly to do anything.”

“I know, I know.”

“The leaders are letting us down. Too much high living. Too many conferences in exotic places. Too much jostling to go abroad to do publicity and raise funds. By the way. You remember that weaver-caste fellow who betrayed us to the police a couple of years ago?”

Willie said, “The Bhoj Narayan business?”

“He wouldn’t be giving any evidence against anybody. I don’t think they would be booking Bhoj Narayan under Section 302.”

Willie said, “What a relief.”

“I wanted you to know. I know how close you two were.”

“Are you going to do that action?”

“I mustn’t talk any more about it. You can talk these things away, you know. It’s like mathematics when you’re young. It comes to you without your knowledge, when you are most silent.”

Willie thought of the little weaver colony as he had last seen it: the red sky, the clean front yards where yarn was spun into thread, the three-wheeler scooter-taxi in front of the house where Raja lived with his elder brother. He remembered the cooking fire, festive-looking in the fading light of day, in the half-open kitchen of the leaf-cigarette makers a hundred yards away: people twice as well off, or half as poor, as the weavers; that early fire seeming to mark the difference between them. He remembered the elder brother’s wife in her cotton peasant skirt falling to the floor of the little house before Bhoj Narayan, holding his knees and pleading for her brother-in-law’s life beside the home-made loom.

He thought, “Who here would know that I cared for those men? Perhaps both brothers are better off dead. Perhaps it’s as Ramachandra said. For people like Raja and his brother the damage is already too great. This generation is lost, and perhaps the next as well. Perhaps both brothers have been spared an untold amount of useless striving and needless pain.”

EVERY TWO WEEKS now there were district meetings. Squad leaders or their representatives came from liberated areas in different parts of the forest in a kind of mimicry of old-fashioned social life. The news they brought, unofficially, was of police arrests and the liquidation of squads, but the fiction of successful revolution and the ever-expanding liberated areas was still maintained, at least in the formal discussions, so that these discussions became more and more abstract. They might debate, for instance, with great seriousness, whether landlordism or imperialism was the greater contradiction. One man might become vehement about imperialism — which in the setting really felt very far away — and afterwards someone might say to Willie, “He would say that, of course. His father is a landlord, and when he is talking about imperialism what he is really saying is, ‘ Whatever you people do, stay away from my father and family.’ ” Or they might debate — they did it every two weeks, and everyone knew what would be said on either side — whether the peasantry or the industrial proletariat was going to bring about the revolution. In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words.

In the middle of this came news of Einstein’s action. He had done it all as he had said, and it had failed. Einstein had said that the high wall of the minister’s official house was good for the action because it would hide Einstein and his friends in the kidnap car. But his research was not as thorough as he had boasted at the sector meeting. What the wall also did was hide the full security arrangements of the house from Einstein. He had thought that there was only one armed guard and he was at the gate. What he discovered, on the day of the action, and seconds away from the intended kidnap, was that there were two further armed guards inside. He decided to call the whole thing off, and almost as soon as he had entered the yard he pushed his way back past the guard at the gate and got into the car. The lights were against them, but the man they had deputed to stop the cross-traffic did his job beautifully, walking slowly to the middle of the road, pulling on big white gloves and stopping the traffic. Some people had thought that this was the weakest part of the plan. As it turned out, this was the only part that worked. And, as Einstein had said, it was hardly noticed.

When he reappeared among them, he said, “Perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps the police would have come down really hard on us.”

Willie said, “You were pretty cool, to cancel at the last moment. I probably would have pressed on. The more I saw myself getting into a mess, the more I would have pressed on.”

Einstein said, “All plans should have that little room for flexibility.”

A senior man of the council of the movement came to the next section meeting. He was in his sixties, far older than Willie had expected. So perhaps the boastful madman who had talked about being in all the movements for thirty years was right in some things. He was also something of a dandy, the senior man of the council, tall and slender and with beautifully barbered, glossy grey hair. This again was something Willie hadn’t expected.

Einstein, to turn the talk away from his own abandoned plan, said to the man of the council, “We really should stop talking about the liberated areas. We tell people in the universities that the forest is a liberated area, and we tell people in the forest that the universities are a liberated area. Unlikely things happen: these people sometimes meet. We are fooling nobody, and we are putting off the people we want to recruit.”

The man of the council fell into a great rage. His face became twisted and he said, “Who are these people who will want to question me? Have they read the books I have read? Can they read those books? Can they begin to understand Marx and Lenin? I am not Kandapalli. These people will do as I say. They will stand when I tell them to stand, and sit when I tell them to sit. Have I made this long journey here to listen to this kind of rubbish? I might have been arrested at any time. I have come here to talk about new tactics, and I get this tosh.”

His rage — the rage of a man who had for too long been used to having his own way — clouded the rest of the meeting, and no one raised any further serious points.

Later Einstein said to Willie, “That man makes me feel like a fool. He makes us all fools. I cannot imagine that we have been doing what we have been doing for his sake.”

Willie said (a little of his ancient London college wit unexpectedly coming back to him, overriding his caution), “Perhaps the big books he has been reading have been about the great rulers of the century.”

THE NEW TACTICS that should have been discussed at that meeting came directly from the council as commands. Liberated areas were henceforth to be isolated and severely policed; people in these areas were to know only what the movement wanted them to know. Roads and bridges on the perimeter were to be blown up. There were to be no telephones, no newspapers from outside, no films, no electricity. There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the better off. The revolutionary madman Willie and Keso had met had spoken of the philosophy of murder as his revolutionary gift to the poor, the cause for which week after week he walked from village to village. Something like this philosophy was brought into play again, and presented as doctrine. Murders of class enemies — which now meant only peasants with a little too much land — were required now, to balance the successes of the police. Discipline in the squads was to be tightened up; squad members were to report on one another.

Willie was reassigned to a new squad, and found himself suddenly among suspicious strangers. He lost the room in the low-eaved hut, which he had grown to think of as his. His squad was a road-destroying and bridge-destroying squad, and he lived in a tented camp, again constantly on the move. He became disorientated. He remembered the time when it consoled him, gave him a hold on things, to count the beds he had slept in. Such a hold was no longer possible for him. He wished now passionately only to save himself, to get in touch with himself again, to get away to the upper air. But he didn’t know where he was. His only consolation — and he wasn’t sure how much of a consolation it was — was that, amid all the strangers whose characters he didn’t want to read, whom (out of his great fatigue and disorientation now) he wished to keep as mysteries — his only consolation was that at the two-weekly meetings of the section he continued to see Einstein.

Now there came the order for the squad to get villagers to kill better-off farmers. This was no longer optional, a goal that might be reached one day when conditions were suitable. This was an order, like a retail chain ordering its managers to improve sales. The council wanted figures.

Willie and another man from the squad went with a gun to a village at dusk. Willie remembered the madman’s story of going to a village after nightfall and asking the first labourer he saw to kill the landlord. That had happened thirty years ago. And now Willie was living through it again. Only now there was no landlord.

They stopped a labourer. He was dark, with a short turban, and had rough, hard hands. He looked well fed.

The man with Willie said, “Good evening, brother. Who is the richest man in your village?”

The villager seemed to know what they were leading up to. He said to Willie, “Please take your gun and go away.”

The man with Willie said, “Why should we go away?”

The villager said, “It will be all right for you two. You will go away to your nice houses. At the end of this business, if I follow you, I will get my arse beaten by somebody or other. Of that I am absolutely sure.”

The man with Willie said, “But if you kill the rich man, that will be one less man to oppress you.”

The villager said to Willie, “You kill him for me. Besides, I don’t know how to use a gun.”

Willie said, “I’ll show you how to use a gun.”

The villager said, “It really will be much simpler for everybody if you killed him.”

Willie said, “I’ll show you. You hold it like this, and look down here.”

Down the sight of the gun a farmer came into view. He was coming down a slight hill. He was at the end of his day’s labour. Willie and the man with him and the villager were hidden by a thicket beside the village path.

Looking down the gunsight at the man, the gun moving minute distances as if in response to the uncertainty or certainty in his mind, the scale of things altered for Willie, and he played with that change of scale. Something like this had happened in Portuguese Africa when, after a mass killing of settlers, the government had opened the police rifle range to people who wished to learn to shoot. Willie knew nothing of guns, but the change of scale in the world around him when he looked down the gunsight entranced him. It was like focusing on a flame in a dark room: a mystical moment that made him think of his father and the ashram where he dispensed this kind of enlightenment.

Somebody said, “You have the rich man in your sights.”

Without looking at the speaker, Willie recognised the voice of the commander of his new squad.

The commander, not a young man, said, “We’ve been worried about you for some time. You cannot ask a man to do something you can’t do yourself. Shoot. Now.”

And the figure who had been trembling in and out of the gunsight half spun to one side, as though he had been dealt a heavy blow, and then fell on the path on the slope.

The squad commander said to the shocked villager, “You see. That’s all there is to it.”

When his blood cooled, Willie thought, “I am among absolute maniacs.”

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 of — I feel this as a blessing.”