Magic Seeds

SEVEN. NOT THE SINNERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Willie, I left the Charlottenburg flat long ago, and your letter was passed on from one address to another and finally here. Berliners are very good about that sort of thing. I am sorry you have had so long to wait for a reply. It must have been awful for you. And all the time I was so close to you, less than a day away. But please don’t think I will come to see you if you don’t want it. In London when I went to see you that time at the college you didn’t like it too much. I remember that. And all I wanted was to do good. It is my curse. The business went so wrong so quickly for you. What can I say? I will never forgive myself. That is no consolation for you, I know. You were sent to the wrong people, and as it turned out the other lot were not going to be much better. You were going to be snookered either way.

I came here because I needed a rest from Berlin, and I thought I should come and be with our father, who is near the end. I have told you this before, but I think now he was a finer man than any of us gave him credit for. Perhaps in the end one way of life is as good as any other, but that probably is what defeated people have to tell themselves. I am not too happy with what I have done, though everything was always done with the best of intentions. It is awful to say, but I believe I have sent many people to their doom in many countries. I know now that in the last few years the intelligence people of various countries followed us wherever we went. People trusted us because of what we had done, and we let nobody down. But then in these last few years the people we persuaded to let us make films about them were later picked up one by one. I can give you a list of the countries. It wasn’t always like that, and Wolf had nothing to do with it. He is as much of a dupe as the rest of us.

I don’t know how I can live with this idea. I was acting for the best, but when the chips were down people would say I was acting for the worst. Perhaps the best thing now would be for someone to bump me off in revenge.

I have nothing more to say just now. You wouldn’t believe from what I have written that my heart is breaking. If I read this letter over I will scrap it and never start writing another. So I will send it as it is. Please let me know whether you want me to come and see you. A little money always comes in handy in jail. Please remember that.

It took him some time to digest all that was in the letter. He had felt at first that the letter, childish in parts, was emotionally false. But after some time, considering that when she wrote the letter she would have been surrounded by memories of childhood despair (which would have been like his own), he felt that everything was true. The news of betrayals did not surprise him; but that might have been because in these past few years he had got used to the fluidity, so to speak, of human personality as it adapted to new circumstances. What was upsetting was that for so long she (who had misled him) had been so near and in such a penitent mood. When the world had become phantasmagoric for him, during those desolate marches and bivouacs in the forest, fruitless and unending, he might at any moment have reached out a hand to her, so to speak, and been put in touch again with reality.

He waited for some days before writing. He wanted to clarify his thoughts and to find the right words. (There was no need for rush. Every everyday thing had to be stretched out now: a new form of yoga.) And this time her reply came in ten days.

Dear Willie, I was expecting some word of rebuke from you. There was none. You are a saint. Perhaps after all you are our father’s son …

And all around him was the regimented, protected life of the jail: nine outdoor hours, fifteen hours of confinement.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT: that, for visitors, was on the inside of the front wall, at the end of the lane leading to the double main gate. For the prisoners there were smaller signs in sloping, racy lettering. Truth always wins. Anger is a man’s greatest enemy. To do good is the greatest religion. Work is worship. Nonviolence is the greatest of all religions. The time would come when he would cease to see the signs. But in the beginning, out of some kind of student’s impishness, surviving in him though he was now not far off fifty, Willie thought he should write on a wall: A stitch in time saves nine. He never attempted it. Punishments were severe. But in his mind’s eye he saw the sign sitting casually among the other pieties, and it amused him for weeks.

WILLIE SHARED A CELL with seven or eight other prisoners. The number varied: some people came and went. The cell was quite big, thirty feet by ten or twelve feet, and for some prisoners it was bigger than anything they had known outside.

One or two prisoners had grown up in factory slums in a city, with brothers and sisters and parents all in one room. The standard room in those places was a cube, ten feet in all directions, with a loft about seven feet up that provided extra sleeping space (especially useful for night workers, who could sleep through the morning or afternoon while daytime family life went on below them). The man who told Willie this did so in a straightforward way at first, speaking of things that to him were quite straightforward, but when he saw that he was shocking Willie he began to swagger a little and exaggerate. In the end (Willie asked a lot of questions) the man had to admit, unwillingly, since it spoiled his story, that the one-room family life he was describing was possible only because so many things were done outside the room, in the wide corridor and in the yard. For the rest, the man said, it was like getting on a crowded bus. You didn’t think you could get on, but somehow you did; once you were in, you didn’t think you could last, but just a minute or two later, with the movement of the bus, everybody had shaken down and after a while everyone was quite comfortable. It was a little bit like jail, the man said. You didn’t think you could do it, but then you found it wasn’t so bad after all. A good roof, a ceiling fan in the really hot weather, a good solid concrete floor, regular food, a splash below the standpipe in the yard every morning, and even a little television, if you didn’t mind standing up with the others to watch it.

This man’s pleasure in the jail routine helped Willie. And even when, in the way of jails, the man had moved on, Willie remembered what he had said about “shaking down” and added it to his yoga.

The people in the cell gradually changed until they were all like Willie, men of the movement who had surrendered. Their treatment then was much better, and the jail superintendent, as if explaining this, said one day, when he was doing his weekly round, with all his deferential officials, that they were now regarded as “politicals.” The British, the superintendent said, had established this category of prisoner to deal with Gandhi and Nehru and the other nationalists who broke the law but couldn’t be treated like other criminals.

Willie was excited by the prospect of favoured treatment. But his excitement didn’t last long. The people in the political cells (there was another) were free, always within the jail routine, to organise their activities. And very quickly Willie saw that this favoured treatment had taken him back to what he had walked away from. The routine the politicals established was very much like the routine of the first camp in the teak forest, but without guns and military training. At five thirty they were awakened. At six they assembled outside, and then for two and a half hours they worked on the jail’s vegetable plots and orchard. At nine they came back and had breakfast. After that they read the local regional newspapers (provided by the jail) and discussed the news. But the serious intellectual work of the morning was studying the texts of Mao and Lenin. This study, half pious, half mendacious, with people saying what they felt they had to say about the peasantry and the proletariat and the revolution, was sterile to Willie, always a waste of education and mind, and soon, in spite of the favoured treatment and even respect it secured in the jail, it became unbearable. He felt that what remained of his mind would rot away if for three or four hours a day he had to take part in these discussions. And even after the afternoon games and exercise, volleyball, jogging, which was meant to tire them out so that they could sleep, there were evening political discussions, shallow and lying and repetitive, with nothing new ever said, in the cell after lock-up time at six thirty.

Willie thought, “I will not last. I will not shake down, as that man said people shook down in the crowded bus when the bus began to move. In the bus you can shake down because you are all body. You are not asked to use mind. Here you have to use mind or half-mind in a terrible, corrupting way. Even sleep is poisoned, because you know what you are going to wake up to. One terrible day follows another. It is extraordinary to think that people do this to themselves.”

One Monday, about two months later, when the superintendent was doing his round with his retinue of lesser jail officials, Willie broke out of the line of standing prisoners. He said to the superintendent, “Sir, I would like to see you in your office, if that is possible.” The lower jail people, warder and head warder and chief head warder, were all for beating Willie back with their long staffs, but Willie’s civility and educated voice and his calling the superintendent sir acted like protection.

The superintendent said to the jailer, “Bring him to my office after the round.”

The hierarchy of the jail! It was like the army, it was like a business organisation, it was a little bit like the hierarchy of the movement. The foot-soldiers were the warder and head warder and chief head warder (though “warder” sounded such a good, polite word). The officers were the sub-jailer and the jailer (in spite of the brutal, key-jangling associations of the word, more suited, Willie always thought, to the lower men who padded about outside the cells). Above the sub-jailer and jailer was the deputy superintendent of jails and, at the very top, the superintendent of jails. When a prisoner came to the jail, he might know nothing about the hierarchy that now ruled his life, might not be able to read the uniforms, but soon his reaction to uniforms and titles was instinctive.

The superintendent’s office was panelled in some dark brown wood that had possibly been varnished. At the top of the wall a metal grille with a flat diamond pattern provided an air vent. On one panelled wall was a very large plan of the jail: the compounds, the cells, the assembly grounds, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the two perimeter walls, with every important exit marked with a thick red X.

On the superintendent’s shoulders were the shining metal initials of the state prison service.

Willie said, “I asked to see you, sir, because I wish to be moved from the cell where I am.”

The superintendent said, “But it’s the best cell in the jail. A nice, big space. A lot of open-air activity. And you have the most educated people there. Discussions and so on.”

Willie said, “I can’t stand it. I have had eight years of that sort of thing. I want to be with my own thoughts. Please put me among the ordinary criminals.”

“This is most unusual. It’s very rough in the other cells. We are trying to treat you here as the British treated the mahatma and Nehru and the others.”

“I know. But please move me.”

“It will not be easy for you. You are an educated man.”

“Let me try.”

“All right. But let me do it in two weeks or so. Let people forget that you came to see me. I don’t want them to believe that you asked to be moved. They might feel insulted, or they might think you were an informer, and they might make trouble for you in various ways. In a jail everybody is at war. You must remember that.”

Three weeks later Willie was moved to a cell in the other part of the jail. It was terrible. The cell was a long concrete room seemingly without furniture. All the way down the middle was a clear passageway about six feet wide. On either side of this passageway were the prisoners’ floor spaces. Willie’s strip of floor was about three feet wide, and he had a jail rug (in a bold blue pattern) on his strip of floor. That was all. No table, no cupboard: prisoners here kept such possessions as they had at the head of their floor space. Space was tight; one rug touched the other. The prisoners, sleeping or waking, kept their heads against the wall and their feet pointing towards the passageway. Each rug had a different pattern and colour; this helped every man to know his space (and was also useful to the warders).

Willie thought, “I can’t go and ask the superintendent to move me back to the politicals. And when I think about it, I am not sure that I want to go back. They have that lovely vegetable garden and fruit orchard to work in. But all that discussion of the newspapers in the morning, which is no discussion at all, and all that study of Mao and Lenin in the evening is too big a price. Even in Africa among the settlers there was nothing quite so bad. Perhaps if I were a stronger man I could do it all and not be affected. But I am not strong in that way.”

That first evening, as he was walking in the central open area between the jail rugs and the bed spaces, a very small man sprang up crying from one of the rugs and ran to Willie’s feet and held them. He was about four feet nine or ten inches, from Bangladesh, an illegal immigrant; whenever after each jail sentence he was taken to the border the Bangladeshis pushed him back, and he had some months of wandering until some new Indian jail claimed him. The sudden crying and leaping up and running to grasp the knees of some new official or visitor was one of his turns, something he did like a trained animal: his whole life was reduced to that.

A letter came from Sarojini.

Dear Willie, Our father is dead. He was cremated yesterday. I did not think to trouble you with this news, because I did not think you wanted to be troubled. Anyway, this is my news for you. I have decided to take over our father’s ashram. My thoughts have been running in that direction for some time, as I think you know. I have no religious wisdom, and I will not be able to offer people anything of what our father offered them. I think what I will do is to turn the ashram into a place of quiet and meditation, something with a Buddhist slant, which I know a little about, from Wolf. How strange it is that I, who had so little use for this kind of place all my life, should now do this. But life does this to people sometimes. Let me come and see you. I will explain things more fully face to face …

He got a sheet of ruled paper from the warder and, lying on his rug and twisting his body a little over his neighbour’s space so that he could write on the low window sill of the cell, he wrote:

Dear Sarojini, You run from one extreme to the other. The idea of the ashram is an idea of death in life, and it goes against everything you have believed. What we discussed in Berlin remains true. I am grateful to you for making me face myself and what I come from. I consider that a gift of life. I am surrounded here by a kind of distress I don’t know how to deal with, but the ashram is not the way. Nor was that foolish war which I went to fight. That war was not yours or mine and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression, but we were exploiting them all the time. Our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves. That was terrible to me, and it continues even here, where the talkers have favoured treatment and the poor are treated as the poor always are. They are mostly village people and they are undersized and thin. The most important thing about them is their small size. It is hard to associate them with the bigger crimes and the crimes of passion for which some of them are being punished. Abduction, kidnapping. I suppose if you were a villager you would see them as criminal and dangerous, but if you see them from a distance, as I still see them, although I am close to them night and day, you would be moved by the workings of the human soul, so complete within those frail bodies. Those wild and hungry eyes haunt me. They seem to me to carry a distillation of the country’s unhappiness. I don’t think there is any one single simple action which can help. You can’t take a gun and kill that unhappiness. All you can do is to kill people.

SAROJINI CAME TO see him. She wore a white sari — white the colour of grief — and of course she didn’t have to wait with the others who had come to see prisoners in Willie’s cell. Her manner, her speech, and her dress won her immediate regard, and she did not squat in the hot sun — in a low subdued queue, two persons wide — with the other visitors, under the gaze of the warders with their heavy staffs. She sat in a room in the front of the jail and Willie was called to see her. He liked her sari, and her general style, just as much as he had liked the jeans and chunky pullovers she had worn in Berlin.

She was enraged about the country people waiting in line in the sun to see their relations.

He said, “They don’t complain. They are happy to be in the queue. Some people make long journeys and wait all night and then in the morning they are turned away. Because they can’t tip the warders, or because they didn’t know they had to tip the warders. Money makes everything easy in the jail. The warders have to make a living, too, you know.”

“You are trying to shock me. But I expected that. It tells me you are in good spirits.”

“What we can really try to do is to get me in the hospital. There are about sixteen or twenty beds there. It’s a big, airy room, quite bare, but one isn’t looking for interior decoration in a jail. If we can slip the warders thirty or forty rupees a day, then my time in the jail becomes pure pleasure. I get an iron bed with a mattress, which is better than a rug on the floor, and all my meals are brought from the kitchen straight to me. Breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. Like a hotel.”

“What about the sick people?”

“They are where they belong, in the cells. What did you expect?”

She said, quite seriously, “If I did it, would you go?”

“I might. I am getting tired of the cell. I also would like to get something to read. The other people can discuss Lenin and Mao until the cows come home. But the only thing they like you to read in the common cells is a religious book.”

“You’ll be a mental wreck by the time you leave.”

“I think you are right. I am coming to the end of my mental resources. Once in Africa I had arranged to meet someone in the town on the coast. At a café or something. For various reasons I was terribly late. More than an hour. Yet when I went to the café the man was there, calmly waiting. He was a Portuguese. I apologised. He said, ‘There is no need. I have a well-stocked mind.’ I thought that was very grand. Probably he had heard it from somebody else, but I made it my ideal. After that, whenever I was in a doctor’s waiting room, say, or a hospital outpatients department, I never ran to the dingy magazines to kill time. I examined my well-stocked mind. I’ve been doing a lot of that in my cell. But my mind is letting me down now. I am coming to the end of what it has. I’ve thought of our parents and my childhood. Actually, there’s a lot there. I’ve thought of London. I’ve thought of Africa. I’ve thought of Berlin. Very important. I’ve thought of my years in the movement. If I were a religious man I would say that I was putting my spiritual life in order. Counting the beds I slept in.”

Two weeks after Sarojini’s visit he was transferred to the hospital ward. He received books from her and began to read again. He was dazzled by everything he read. Everything seemed miraculous. Every writer seemed a prodigy. Something like this used to happen to him when very long ago, in another life, as it now seemed, he had tried to write stories and was sometimes stuck, his mind clogged. Those days usually occurred when he was deep in a story. He would wonder how anyone ever had the courage to write a sentence. He might even look at an aspirin bottle or a cough syrup bottle and marvel at the confidence of the man who had written the directions and warnings. In some such way now a deep regard came to him for everyone who could put words together, and he was transported by everything he read. The experience was glorious, and he would think that it was probably worth coming to jail just for this, this heightening of intellectual pleasure, this opening up of something in life he knew little of.

Something unusual happened five months or so after he had gone to the hospital ward.

The superintendent was doing his Monday morning round. Willie felt the superintendent’s eyes on him and the first thought that came to him was that his time in the hospital ward was coming to an end. Sure enough, later that day a message came to Willie from the superintendent, relayed down the chain of command.

The next day Willie went to the superintendent’s dark-panelled office with the diamond pattern in iron over the air vent.

The superintendent said, “You are walking wounded, I see.”

Willie made a pleading gesture, asking for understanding.

“I will tell you why I called you. I’ve explained to you the privileged position you enjoy in the jail and which is open to you at any moment to take advantage of. We operate under the same rules as in the British time. You gave an undertaking at the time of your surrender that you had done nothing that could be thought of as a heinous crime under Section 302. It was part of the package. All of you gave that undertaking. So we have the strange situation where hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed by your movement, but we have not been able to find a single one of you who did anything. In all your statements it was always someone else who killed or pulled the trigger. Suppose now that there is someone in the jail who wishes to change that statement. Someone who is actually willing to say that X or Y or Z had actually done a particular killing.”

Willie said, “Is there such a person?”

The superintendent said, “There may be. In a jail everybody is at war. I told you that.”

HE WAS QUITE lucid in the superintendent’s office. But later in his hospital bed his mind clouded and he was swamped by darkness. Cold fluids seemed to flow through his body. Something like real illness seemed to chill him. And yet all the time with the steadier part of his mind he was also thinking, as though he was filing away something for future use, “This is beautifully done. If you have to betray and damage someone, this is the way to do it. When it is least expected, and with no calling card.”

A Gandhi-capped prisoner brought his dinner from the jail kitchen. It was what it always was. A plastic bowl of lentil soup, thickened perhaps with flour (you couldn’t tell until you tasted it). And six pieces of flat bread, cooling and sweating fast.

When he woke up in the night, he thought, in the desolation of the hospital ward, “Yesterday I was happy.”

He had trained himself to stay away from the vegetable patches and the orchard where the politicals worked. But the next morning when he went to have a look he saw the man whom he feared to see: Einstein. His mind had fastened on him as the betrayer, and this sighting of him for the first time in the jail grounds was like a confirmation. Einstein, intuitively disliked at first sight (and the memory of that first dislike was always with Willie), intuitively distrusted, then a companion in bad times, and now distrusted again. Willie knew that Einstein would have felt about him what he had felt about Einstein. He had grown to believe, especially in those last years in the forest, that there was a neat reciprocity in relationships. If you liked a man you would invariably get on with him; if you didn’t feel easy with him he almost certainly felt the same way about you. In the jail Einstein and many of the others would have gone back to their hate, each man to his own, as to some secret treasure, something which in a time of uncertainty they could gaze on and be revivified. (Willie remembered the rhetorical and ignorant and boastful revolutionary they had met in the forest, a remnant of a long-defeated rebellion, who had been tramping through the villages for thirty years with his simple philosophy of murder, incapable now of any higher thought, and yet easily made timid.) It didn’t take much to see how in the jail Einstein, daily cherishing the private treasure of his hate, and for no other reason, perhaps for no reward, would find immense satisfaction in this betrayal of Willie.

After that sighting of Einstein Willie went back to his hospital bed. He asked the warder for a sheet of writing paper and wrote to Sarojini.

Two weeks later she came to see him. When he told her what had happened she said, “This is serious.”

And immediately he could see, in spite of her ashram life and white cotton sari, her fixer’s mind at work. To agitate on behalf of political prisoners all over the world had been part of her political work. In the small room in the jail he could see her mind ranging fast over the possibilities.

She said, “Who published your book in London? The book of stories.”

He told her. It seemed like another life now.

“A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?”

“The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London.”

“Clearly those riots had an effect on you?” She was like a lawyer.

“I don’t know.”

“Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you associated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that.”

“There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don’t suppose that’s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That’s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book.”

“Thirty years on he might be famous.”

He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarrassed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.

ROGER, THE LAWYER, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years there he had often looked at it. As the Latin poet says, Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way, books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you. Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger’s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.

It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.

“Still walking wounded,” the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, “You never told us you were a writer.”

Willie said, “It was a long time ago.”

“That’s just it,” the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. “It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing.”

And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.

Six months later, under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.