Magic Seeds.
by V. S. Naipaul.
LATER-IN THE teak forest, in the first camp, when during his first night on sentry duty he had found himself for periods wishing only to cry, and when with the relief of dawn there had also come the amazing cry of a far-off peac.o.c.k, the cry a peac.o.c.k makes in the early morning after it has had its first drink of water at some forest pool: a raucous, tearing cry that should have spoken of a world refreshed and remade but seemed after the long bad night to speak only of everything lost, man, bird, forest, world; and then, when that camp was a romantic memory, during the numbing guerrilla years, going on and on, in forest, village, small town, when to travel about in disguise had often appeared to be an end in itself and it was possible for much of the day to forget what the purpose of the disguise was, when he had felt himself decaying intellectually, felt bits of his personality breaking off; and then in the jail, with its blessed order, its fixed timetable, its protecting rules, the renewal it offered-later it was possible to work out the stages by which he had moved from what he would have considered the real world to all the subsequent areas of unreality: moving as it were from one sealed chamber of the spirit to another teak forest, in the first camp, when during his first night on sentry duty he had found himself for periods wishing only to cry, and when with the relief of dawn there had also come the amazing cry of a far-off peac.o.c.k, the cry a peac.o.c.k makes in the early morning after it has had its first drink of water at some forest pool: a raucous, tearing cry that should have spoken of a world refreshed and remade but seemed after the long bad night to speak only of everything lost, man, bird, forest, world; and then, when that camp was a romantic memory, during the numbing guerrilla years, going on and on, in forest, village, small town, when to travel about in disguise had often appeared to be an end in itself and it was possible for much of the day to forget what the purpose of the disguise was, when he had felt himself decaying intellectually, felt bits of his personality breaking off; and then in the jail, with its blessed order, its fixed timetable, its protecting rules, the renewal it offered-later it was possible to work out the stages by which he had moved from what he would have considered the real world to all the subsequent areas of unreality: moving as it were from one sealed chamber of the spirit to another.
ONE.
The Rose-Sellers
IT HAD BEGUN many years before, in Berlin. Another world. He was living there in a temporary, half-and-half way with his sister Sarojini. After Africa it had been a great refreshment, this new kind of protected life, being almost a tourist, without demands and without anxiety. It had to end, of course; and it began to end the day Sarojini said to him, "You"ve been here for six months. I may not be able to get your visa renewed again. You know what that means. You may not be able to stay here. That"s the way the world is made. You can"t object to it. You"ve got to start thinking of moving on. Do you have any idea of where you can go? Is there anything you feel you want to do?" many years before, in Berlin. Another world. He was living there in a temporary, half-and-half way with his sister Sarojini. After Africa it had been a great refreshment, this new kind of protected life, being almost a tourist, without demands and without anxiety. It had to end, of course; and it began to end the day Sarojini said to him, "You"ve been here for six months. I may not be able to get your visa renewed again. You know what that means. You may not be able to stay here. That"s the way the world is made. You can"t object to it. You"ve got to start thinking of moving on. Do you have any idea of where you can go? Is there anything you feel you want to do?"
Willie said, "I know about the visa. I"ve been thinking about it."
Sarojini said, "I know your kind of thinking. It means putting something to the back of your mind."
Willie said, "I don"t see what I can do. I don"t know where I can go."
"You"ve never felt there was anything for you to do. You"ve never understood that men have to make the world for themselves."
"You"re right."
"Don"t talk to me like that. That"s the way the oppressor cla.s.s thinks. They"ve just got to sit tight, and the world will continue to be all right for them."
Willie said, "It doesn"t help me when you twist things. You know very well what I mean. I feel a bad hand was dealt me. What could I have done in India? What could I have done in England in 1957 or 1958? Or in Africa?"
"Eighteen years in Africa. Your poor wife. She thought she was getting a man. She should have talked to me."
Willie said, "I was always someone on the outside. I still am. What can I do here in Berlin?"
"You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You"ve always preferred to hide. It"s the colonial psychosis, the caste psychosis. You inherited it from your father. You were in Africa for eighteen years. There was a great guerrilla war there. Didn"t you know?"
"It was always far away. It was a secret war, until the very end."
"It was a glorious war. At least in the beginning. When you think about it, it can bring tears to the eyes. A poor and helpless people, slaves in their own land, starting from scratch in every way. What did you do? Did you seek them out? Did you join them? Did you help them? That was a big enough cause to anyone looking for a cause. But no. You stayed in your estate house with your lovely little half-white wife and pulled the pillow over your ears and hoped that no bad black freedom fighter was going to come in the night with a gun and heavy boots and frighten you."
"It wasn"t like that, Sarojini. In my heart of hearts I was always on the Africans" side, but I didn"t have a war to go to."
"If everybody had said that, there would never have been any revolution anywhere. We all have wars to go to."
They were in a cafe in the Knesebeckstra.s.se. In the winter it had been warm and steamy and civilized with its student waiters and waitresses and welcoming to Willie. Now in late summer it was stale and oppressive, its rituals too well known, a reminder to Willie-in spite of what Sarojini said-of time pa.s.sing fruitlessly by, calling up the mysterious sonnet they had had to learn by heart in the mission school. And yet this time removed was summer"s time ... And yet this time removed was summer"s time ...
A young Tamil man came in selling long-stemmed red roses. Sarojini made a small gesture with her hand and began to look in her bag. The Tamil came and held the roses to them, but his eyes made no contact with theirs. He claimed no kinship with them. He was self-possessed, the rose-seller, full of the idea of his own worth. Willie, not looking at the man"s face, concentrating on his brown trousers (made by tailors far away) and the too-big gold-plated watch and wristlet (perhaps not really gold) on his hairy wrist, saw that in his own setting the rose-seller would have been someone of no account, someone unseeable. Here, in a setting which perhaps he understood as little as Willie did, a setting which perhaps he had not yet learned to see, he was like a man taken out of himself. He had become someone else.
Willie had met a man like that one day, some weeks before, when he had gone out on his own. He had stopped outside a South Indian restaurant, without customers, with a few flies crawling on the plate-gla.s.s windows above the potted plants and the display plates of rice and dosas, and with small amateurish-looking waiters (perhaps not really waiters, perhaps something else, perhaps electricians or accountants illegally arrived) lurking in the interior gloom against the cheap glitter of somebody"s idea of oriental decoration. An Indian or Tamil man had come up to Willie then. Soft-bodied, but not fat, with a broad soft face, and with a flat grey cap marked with thin blue lines in a wide check pattern, like the "Kangol" golfer"s caps that Willie remembered seeing advertised on the back pages of the early Penguin books: perhaps the style had come to the man from those old advertis.e.m.e.nts.
The man began to talk to Willie about the great guerrilla war to come. Willie was interested, even friendly. He liked the soft, smiling face. He was held by the flat cap. He liked the conspiratorial talk, the idea it carried of a world about to be astonished. But when the man began to talk of the great need for money, when this talk became insistent, Willie became worried, then frightened, and he began to back away from the restaurant window with the trapped, drowsy flies. And even while the man still appeared to smile there came from his soft lips a long and harsh and profound religious curse delivered in Tamil, which Willie still half understood, at the end of which the man"s smile had gone and his face below the blue-checked golf cap had twisted into a terrible hate.
It unsettled Willie, the sudden use of Tamil, the ancient religious curse into which the man had put all his religious faith, the deep and abrupt hate, like a knife thrust. Willie didn"t tell Sarojini about the meeting with this man. This habit of keeping things to himself had been with him since childhood, at home and at school; it had developed during his time in London, and had become an absolute part of his nature during the eighteen years he had spent in Africa, when he had had to hide so many obvious things from himself. He allowed people to tell him things he knew very well, and he did so not out of deviousness, not out of any settled plan, but out of a wish not to offend, to let things run on smoothly.
Sarojini, now, lay the rose beside her plate. She followed the rose-seller with her eyes as he walked between the tables. When he went out again she said to Willie, "I don"t know what you feel about that man. But he is worth far more than you."
Willie said, "I"m sure."
"Don"t irritate me. That smart way of talking may work with outsiders. It doesn"t work with me. Do you know why that man is worth more than you? He has found his war. He could have hidden from it. He could have said he had other things to do. He could have said he had a life to live. He could have said, "I"m in Berlin. It"s cost me a lot to get here. All the false papers and visas and hiding. But now that"s done. I"ve got away from home and all that I was. I will pretend to be part of this rich new place. I will watch television and get to know the foreign programmes and start to think that they are really mine. I will go to the KDW and eat at the restaurants. I will learn to drink whisky and wine, and soon I will be counting my money and driving my car and I will feel that I am like the people in the advertis.e.m.e.nts. I will find that, really, it wasn"t hard at all to change worlds, and I will feel that that was the way it was meant to be for all of us." He could have thought in that false and shameful way. But he saw he had a war. Did you notice? He never looked at us. Of course he knew who we were. He knew we were close to him, but he looked down on us. He thought we were among the pretenders."
Willie said, "Perhaps he was ashamed, being a Tamil and selling roses to these people and being seen by us."
"He didn"t look ashamed. He had the look of a man with a cause, the look of a man apart. It"s something you might have noticed in Africa, if you had learned to look. This man"s selling roses here, but those roses are being turned to guns somewhere else far away. It"s how revolutions are made. I"ve been to some of their camps. Wolf and I are working on a film about them. We"ll soon be hearing a lot more about them. There is no more disciplined guerrilla army in the world. They are quite ferocious, quite ugly. And if you knew more about your own history you would understand what a miracle that is."
ANOTHER DAY, in the zoo, in the terrible smell of captive and idle wild animals, she said, "I have to talk to you about history. Otherwise you will think I am mad, like our mother"s uncle. All the history you and people like you know about yourselves comes from a British textbook written by a nineteenth-century English inspector of schools in India called Roper Lethbridge. Did you know that? It was the first big school history book in India, and it was published in the 1880s by the British firm of Macmillan. That makes it just twenty years or so after the Mutiny, and of course it was an imperialist work and it was also meant to make money. But it was also a work of some learning in the British way and it was a success. In all the centuries before in India there had been nothing like it, no system of education like that, no training in that kind of history. Roper Lethbridge went into many editions, and it gave us many of the ideas we still have about ourselves. One of the most important of those ideas was that in India there were servile races, people born to be slaves, and there were martial races. The martial races were fine; the servile races were not. You and I half belong to the servile races. I am sure you know that. I am sure you half accept that. That is why you have lived as you have lived. The Tamils selling roses in Berlin belong wholly to the servile races. That idea would have been impressed on them in all kinds of ways. And that British idea about the servile and the martial races of India is utterly wrong. The British East India Company army in the north of India was a Hindu army of the upper castes. This was the army that pushed the boundaries of the British Empire almost to Afghanistan. But after the great Mutiny of 1857 that Hindu army was degraded. Further military opportunities were denied them. So the warriors who had won the empire became servile in British propaganda, and the frontier people they had conquered just before the Mutiny became the martial ones. It is how imperialisms work. It is what happens to captive people. And since in India we have no idea of history we quickly forget our past and always believe what we are told. As for the Tamils in the south, they became dirt in the new British dispensation. They were dark and unwarlike, good only for labour. They were shipped off as serfs to the plantations in Malaya and Ceylon and elsewhere. Those Tamils selling roses in Berlin in order to buy guns have thrown off a great weight of history and propaganda. They have made themselves a truly martial people, and they have done so against the odds. You must respect them, Willie."
And Willie listened in his blank way, in the bad smell of the unhappy animals in the zoo, and said nothing. Sarojini was his sister. No one in the world understood him so well. She understood every corner of his fantasies; she understood everything of his life in England and Africa, though for those twenty years they had met only once. He felt that, without words pa.s.sing between them, she, who had developed in so many ways, might have understood even the physical details of such s.e.xual life as he had had. Nothing was hidden from her; and even when she was at her most revolutionary and ordinary and hectoring, saying things she had said many times before, she could, by an extra phrase here and there, calling up aspects of their special shared past, start touching things in him that he would have preferred to forget.
He said nothing when she spoke, but dismissed nothing that she said. Gradually in Berlin he noticed something about her which he had never noticed before. Though her talk never ceased to be about injustice and cruelty and the need for revolution, though she played easily with tableaux of blood and bones in five continents, she was strangely serene. She had lost the edginess and aggression which she had had in the early days of her life. She had been rotting in the family ashram, with nothing but piety and subservience to look forward to; and for many years after she had left, that dreadful ashram life, offering simple and needy people counterfeit cures for everything, was still close to her, as something to which she might have to return if things turned out badly with Wolf.
She didn"t have that anxiety now. Just as she had learned how to dress for a cold climate, and had made herself attractive (the days of cardigan and woollen socks with a sari had been left far behind), so travel and study and the politics of revolution, and her easy half-and-half life with the undemanding photographer, appeared to have given her a complete intellectual system. Nothing surprised or wounded her now. Her world view was able to absorb everything: political murders in Guatemala, Islamic revolution in Iran, caste riots in India, and even the petty theft practised as a matter of shopkeeping habit or principle by the wine-shop man in Berlin when he delivered to the flat, two or three bottles always short or changed, the prices altered in complicated, baffling ways.
She would say, "This is what happens in West Berlin. They are at the end of an air corridor, and everything runs on a subsidy. So their energy goes on this kind of petty theft. It is the great failing of the West. They will find out."
Sarojini herself, through her photographer, lived on a subsidy from some West German government agency. So she knew what she was talking about; and she was easy.
She would say, when the new box of wine and beer came, "Let"s see what the scoundrel is getting up to this time."
The Sarojini he had left behind at home twenty or more years before could never have done anything like this. And it was to this serenity of hers, this new elegance of language, that he found himself responding more and more in Berlin. He regarded his sister with wonder. It amazed and thrilled him that she was his sister. After six months with her-they had never been together so long as adults-the world began to change for him. Just as he felt she could enter all his emotions, and even his s.e.xual needs, so he began to enter her way of looking. There was a logic and order in everything she said.
And he saw, what he felt now he had always understood deep down but had never accepted, that there were the two worlds Sarojini spoke about. One world was ordered, settled, its wars fought. In this world without war or real danger people had been simplified. They looked at television and found their community; they ate and drank approved things; and they counted their money. In the other world people were more frantic. They were desperate to enter the simpler, ordered world. But while they stayed outside a hundred loyalties, the residue of old history tied them down; a hundred little wars filled them with hate and dissipated their energies. In the free and busy air of West Berlin everything looked easy. But not far away there was an artificial border, and beyond that border there was constriction, and another kind of person. Weeds and sometimes trees grew on the old ruins of big buildings; everywhere shrapnel and sh.e.l.l had dug into stone and stucco.
The two worlds coexisted. It was foolish to pretend otherwise. He was clear in his own mind now to which world he belonged. It had seemed natural to him twenty and more years ago, at home, to want to hide. Now all that had followed from that wish seemed to him shameful. His half-life in London; and then all his life in Africa, that life when he was permanently in semi-hiding, gauging his success by the fact that in his second-cla.s.s, semi-Portuguese group he didn"t particularly stand out, and was "pa.s.sing;" all that life seemed shameful.
One day Sarojini brought a copy of the Herald Tribune Herald Tribune to the flat. The paper was folded to show a particular story. She pa.s.sed it to him and said, "It"s about the place you used to live." to the flat. The paper was folded to show a particular story. She pa.s.sed it to him and said, "It"s about the place you used to live."
He said, "Please don"t show me. I"ve told you."
"You must start looking."
He took the paper and said to himself, speaking the name of his wife, "Ana, forgive me." He hardly read the words of the story. He didn"t need to. He lived it all in his mind. The civil war had become truly b.l.o.o.d.y. No movement of armies; only raiders from across the frontier coming to burn and kill and terrorise and then going back. There was a photograph of white concrete buildings with their roofs burnt off and with smoke marks outlining empty windows: the simple architecture of rural settler Africa already a ruin. He thought of the roads he knew, the blue rock cones, the little town on the coast. They had all pretended that the world had been made safe; but deep down they all knew that the war was coming, and that one day the roads would disappear.
One day, at the beginning of the insurgency, they had played this game at their Sunday lunch. Let us a.s.sume, they said, that we have cut off the world. Let us imagine what it would be like living here with nothing coming in. First, of course, the cars would go. Then there would be no medicines. Then there would be no cloth. There would be no light. So, at the lunch, with the boys in uniform and the four-wheel drives in the sandy yard, they had played the game, imagining deprivation. And it had all come to pa.s.s.
Willie, full of shame in Berlin at the thought of his behaviour in Africa, thought, "I mustn"t hide any longer. Sarojini is right."
But, following old habit, he didn"t tell her what he was thinking.
THEY WERE WALKING one afternoon below the trees in one of the great shopping avenues. Willie stopped in front of the Patrick h.e.l.lmann shop to look at the Armani clothes in the window. Twenty years before he had known nothing about clothes, had no eye for cloth or cut; now it was different. one afternoon below the trees in one of the great shopping avenues. Willie stopped in front of the Patrick h.e.l.lmann shop to look at the Armani clothes in the window. Twenty years before he had known nothing about clothes, had no eye for cloth or cut; now it was different.
Sarojini said, "Who would you say is the most important person in the world?"
Willie said, "Armani is pretty great, but I don"t think you want me to say that. You want me to say something else?"
"Try."
"Ronald Reagan."
"I thought you would say that."
Willie said, "I said it to provoke you."
"No, no. I think you really believe it. But I don"t mean powerful. I mean important. Does the name Kandapalli Seetaramiah mean anything to you?"
"Is he the most important man?"
"An important man is not necessarily a powerful man. Lenin in 1915 or 1916 wasn"t a powerful man. An important man in my book is someone who is going to bend the course of history. When, in a hundred years, the definitive history of twentieth-century revolution comes to be written, and various ethnocentric prejudices have disappeared, Kandapalli will be up there with Lenin and Mao. Of that I have no doubt. And you haven"t even heard of him. I know."
"Is he part of the Tamil movement?"
"He"s not a Tamil. But Kandapalli and the Tamil movement are parts of the same regenerative process in our world. If only I could get you to believe in that process you will be a changed man."
Willie said, "I know nothing of French history apart from the storming of the Bastille. But I still have an idea of Napoleon. I am sure I"ll understand about Kandapalli if you tell me."
"I wonder. Kandapalli"s towering importance as a revolutionary is that he did away with the Lin-Piao line."
Willie said, "You are going too fast for me."
"You are being provocative. You are pretending. You must know about Lin-Piao. The whole world knows about Lin-Piao. He gave us the idea of liquidating the cla.s.s enemy. It was simple and exciting in the beginning and it seemed the way ahead. In India we also liked it because it came from China and we thought it put us right up there with the Chinese. In fact it destroyed the revolution. The Lin-Piao line turned the revolution into middle-cla.s.s theatre. Young middle-cla.s.s exhibitionists in the towns putting on peasant clothes and staining their skin with walnut juice and going out to join the gangs and thinking that revolution meant killing policemen. The police had no trouble in wiping them out. People in that kind of movement always underestimate the police, I don"t know why. I suppose it"s because they think a little too highly of themselves.
"All of this happened while you were in Africa, where you were witnessing a real war. Afterwards here people would say that we had lost a whole generation of brilliant young revolutionaries and would never be able to replace them. I felt like that myself, and was cast down for many months. Intellectual advance is slow in India. I don"t have to tell you that. The landless labourer moves to the town, and his son perhaps becomes a clerk. The clerk"s son perhaps gets a higher education, and then his son becomes a doctor or a scientist. And so we grieved. It had taken generations to create that pool of revolutionary talent, and the police in a short time had destroyed the struggle and intellectual development of fifty or sixty years. It was terrible to think about.
"I will tell you what it felt like. Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted. You don"t know what to do. The readiest emotion is anger. You start looking for an enemy. And then you very quickly understand that anger, comforting as it is, is useless, that there is nothing or no one to be angry against. You have to find other ways of dealing with your loss. I was in that empty, unhappy mood when I heard of Kandapalli. I don"t actually think I had heard of him before. He proclaimed a new revolution. He said that the talk of the lost generation of brilliant revolutionaries was sentimental rubbish. They were not particularly brilliant or well-educated or revolutionary. If they were they would not have fallen for the foolish Lin-Piao line. No, Kandapalli said, all that had happened was that we had had the good fortune to lose a generation of half-educated, self-centred fools.
"This was wounding for me. Wolf and I had done a lot of work with the revolutionaries. We knew some of them personally. But the brutality of Kandapalli"s words made me think of certain things I had noticed but put to one side. I thought of the man who had come to the hotel to see us. He was absurdly vain. He wanted us to know how well connected he was in the world outside. When we offered him a drink he asked, pointedly, for a treble of imported whisky. In those days imported whisky was three or four times the price of Indian. He was asking for something extremely expensive, and then with something like self-satisfaction he studied our faces to see how we were reacting. I thought he was contemptible, but we of course were trained to control our faces. And of course the treble whisky was too much for him.
"I thought of that and other things, and then, from being wounded by Kandapalli"s words, I was dazzled by the brilliance and simplicity of his a.n.a.lysis. He proclaimed the death of the Lin-Piao line. Instead, he announced the Ma.s.s Line. Revolution was to come from below, from the village, from the people. There was to be no place in this movement for middle-cla.s.s masqueraders. And-would you believe it?-out of the ruins of that earlier, false revolution he has already set going a true revolution. He has liberated large areas. He does not court publicity, unlike the earlier people.
"It was very hard for us to get to meet him. The couriers were suspicious. There was a relay of them. They wanted to have nothing to do with us. In the end we walked for many days in the forest. I thought we were going nowhere. But at last one afternoon, nearly time for us to camp for the night, we came to a small clearing in the forest. The sunlight fell beautifully on a long mud hut with a gra.s.s roof. In front there was a half-harvested mustard field. This was Kandapalli"s headquarters. One of them. After all the drama, we found a simple man. He was short and dark. A primary school teacher, without qualifications. A man from Warangal. n.o.body in a town would have noticed him. Warangal is one of the hottest places in India, and when he started talking about the poor his eyes filled with tears and he trembled."
THIS WAS HOW, in the late summer in Berlin, a new kind of emotional life came to Willie.
Sarojini said, "Every morning when you get up you must think not only of yourself but of others. Think of something that"s close to you here. Think of East Berlin, and the overgrown ruins, and the sh.e.l.l marks from 1945 on the walls, and the people today all looking down as they walk. Think of where you"ve been in Africa. You might want to forget poor Ana, but think of the war there. It"s going on now. Think of your house. Try to imagine Kandapalli in the forest. These are all real places with real people."
Another day she said, "I was awful to you twenty years ago. I rebuked you too much. I was foolish. I knew very little. I had read very little. I just knew our mother"s story and I knew about our mother"s radical uncle. I know now that you were no different from Mahatma Gandhi, and couldn"t help being what you were."
Willie said, "Oh, goodness. Gandhi-that would never have occurred to me. He"s too far away from me."
"I thought it would surprise you. But it"s true. When he was eighteen or nineteen Gandhi came to England to study law. In London he was like a sleepwalker. He had no means of understanding the great city. He hardly knew what he was looking at. He had no idea of the architecture or the museums, no idea of the great writers and politicians who were hidden in the city of the 1890s. I don"t think he went to a play. All he could think of was his law studies and his vegetarian food and cutting his own hair. Just as Vishnu was floating on the primeval ocean of non-being, so Gandhi in London in 1890 was floating on an ocean of not-seeing and not-knowing. At the end of three years of this half-life or quarter-life he became dreadfully depressed. He felt he needed help. There was a Conservative member of parliament who had a reputation of being interested in Indians. This was the only person Gandhi felt he could turn to. He wrote to him and went to see him. He tried to explain his depression, and after a short while the M.P. said, "I know what your problem is. You know nothing about India. You know nothing of the history of India." He recommended some imperialist histories. I am not sure that Gandhi read them. He wanted practical help. He didn"t want to be told to read a history book. Don"t you feel you can see yourself a little bit in that young Gandhi?"
Willie said, "How do you know this about Gandhi and the M.P.? It was a long time ago. Who told you?"
"He wrote his autobiography in the 1920s. A remarkable book. Very simple, very fast, very honest. A book without boasting. A book so true that every young Indian or old Indian can see himself in its pages. There"s no other book like it in India. It would be a modern Indian epic if people read it. But people don"t. They feel they don"t need to. They feel they know it all. They don"t have to find out. It"s the Indian way. I didn"t even know about the autobiography. It was Wolf who first asked me whether I had read it. This was when he"d just come to the ashram at home. He was shocked when he found I didn"t know about it. I have read it two or three times now. It"s so easy to read, such a good story, that you read on and on, and then you find you haven"t been paying proper attention to all the profound things he"s been saying."
Willie said, "I feel you"ve been lucky in Wolf."
"There"s his other family. That"s a great help. I don"t have to be with him all the time. And he"s a good teacher. I suppose that"s one reason why we are still together. I am someone he can teach. He found out fairly soon that I had no feeling for historical time, that I couldn"t tell the difference between a hundred years and a thousand years, or two hundred years or two thousand. I knew our mother and our mother"s uncle and I had some idea of our father"s family. Beyond that everything was a blur, a primeval ocean, in which figures like Buddha and Akbar and Queen Elizabeth and the Rani of Jhansi and Marie Antoinette and Sherlock Holmes floated about and crisscrossed. Wolf told me that the most important thing about a book was its date. No point in reading a book if you didn"t know its date, didn"t know how far away or how close it was to you. The date of a book fixed it in time, and when you got to know other books and events, the dates began to give you a time scale. I can"t tell you how liberating that has been for me. When I think of our history, I no longer feel I am sinking in a timeless degradation. I see more clearly. I have an idea of the scale and sequence of things."
HE FELL INTO old ways. Twenty-five years before, when London had been as formless and bewildering for him as (according to Sarojini) it had been for the mahatma in 1890, Willie had tried to read himself out of his bewilderment, running to the college library to look up the simplest things. So now, to match the breadth of Sarojini"s knowledge, and with the hope of arriving at her serenity, he began to read. He used the British Council library. There one day-he wasn"t looking for it-he found the mahatma"s autobiography, in the English translation by the mahatma"s secretary. old ways. Twenty-five years before, when London had been as formless and bewildering for him as (according to Sarojini) it had been for the mahatma in 1890, Willie had tried to read himself out of his bewilderment, running to the college library to look up the simplest things. So now, to match the breadth of Sarojini"s knowledge, and with the hope of arriving at her serenity, he began to read. He used the British Council library. There one day-he wasn"t looking for it-he found the mahatma"s autobiography, in the English translation by the mahatma"s secretary.
The sweet, simple narrative swept him along. He wished to go on and on, to swallow the book whole, short chapter after short chapter; but very soon he was nagged by many things, already only half remembered, already without clear sequence, that he had read with speed; and (as Sarojini had said) he had often to go back, to read the easy words more slowly, to take in the extraordinary things the writer had been saying in his very calm way. A book (especially in the beginning) about shame, ignorance, incompetence: a whole chain of memories that would have darkened or twisted another life, memories that Willie himself (or Willie"s poor father, as Willie thought) would have wished to take to the grave, but which the courage of this simple confession, arrived at by heaven knows what painful ways, made harmless, almost part of folk memory, in which every man of the country might see himself.
Willie thought, "I wish this healing book had come my way twenty-five years ago. I might have become another man. I would have aimed at another life. I wouldn"t have lived that shabby life in Africa among strangers. I would have felt that I wasn"t alone in the world, that a great man had been there before me. Instead, I was reading Hemingway, who was very far away from me, who had nothing to offer me, and doing my bogus stories. What darkness, what self-deception, what waste. But perhaps I wouldn"t have known how to read the book then. Perhaps it would have said nothing to me. Perhaps I needed to live that life, in order to see it more clearly now. Perhaps things happen when they are meant to happen."
He said to Sarojini, when they were talking about the book, "This wasn"t the mahatma we heard about at home. We were told he was a scoundrel and an actor, false to his fingertips."
She said, "For our mother"s uncle he was a caste oppressor. That was all that they pa.s.sed on to us. It was part of their private caste war, their own revolution. They couldn"t think of anything bigger. No one felt they had to know more about the mahatma."
Willie said, "If he hadn"t gone to South Africa, if he hadn"t run into that other life, would he have done nothing? Would he have gone on in his old way?"
"It"s more than likely. But read the relevant chapters again. You will find that everything is fairly laid out, and you will make up your own mind."
"How South Africa shocked him. You can feel the shame, the bewilderment. He was in no way prepared for it. That terrible incident in the overnight train, and then the indentured Tamil labourer with the b.l.o.o.d.y head coming to him for justice."
Sarojini said, "Beaten up by the planter to whom he had been indentured. The transplanted serfs of the empire, with no rights at all. You could have done anything with them. The ancestors of our rose-sellers here in Berlin. They"ve travelled far in a hundred years. They can fight their own war now. That should make you feel good. We can"t put ourselves in Gandhi"s shoes. To be faced with the most casual kind of brutality and to have no power in one"s hands. Most of us would have run away and hidden. Most of the Indians did, and they still do. But Gandhi, with his holy innocence, thought that there was something he could do. That was how he began his political life, with this need to act. "What can I do?" And that was how it was at the very end. Just before independence there were very bad communal riots in Bengal. He went there. Some people strewed broken bottles and gla.s.s over where he, the frail old mahatma, the man of peace, was to walk. He was by now swamped by his own religious search, but there was enough of the old lucidity left, and he was often during these days heard to say to himself, "What can I do? What can I do?"
"There wasn"t always much he could do. It"s easy to forget that. He wasn"t always the semi-nude mahatma. The semi-religious way he started with in South Africa-the commune, the idea of bread labour, all the mixed ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin-couldn"t do anything in that situation. In his autobiography his account of his twenty years in South Africa is vivid and full of incident, full of things he is doing. You might think that something big is happening, something that is going to change South Africa, but a lot of the struggle he is describing is personal and religious, and if you step back just a little you will see that the mahatma"s time in South Africa was a complete failure. He was forty-six when he gave up and went back to India. Five years older than you, Willie, and with nothing to show for twenty years of work. In India he was starting from scratch. He would have to think and think, then and later, about how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders. It might seem today that things were already happening, and that as the mahatma all he had to do in 1915 was to let himself be carried to the crest. It wasn"t like that. He made things happen. He created the wave. He was a mixture of thought and intuition. Thought, above all. He was a true revolutionary."
And Willie said nothing.
She had taken him far away. She had given him the daily mental exercise of thinking himself back into more desperate places of the world he had seen or known. That had already become a habit of his mornings; and now, in an extension of this morning meditation, he found himself reconsidering his life in India and London, reconsidering Africa and his marriage, acknowledging everything in a new way, hiding nothing, submerging all the pathos of his nondescript past in an enn.o.bling new ideal.
For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up s.p.a.ce when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he had met in London and Africa. Gradually, with this pride, there came to him an unexpected joy, which was like further reward, the joy of knowing that he rejected everything he saw. Sarojini had told him that the people he saw lived for pleasure alone. They ate and watched television and counted their money; they had been reduced to a terrible simplicity. He saw the unnaturalness of this simplicity; at the same time he felt the excitement of the new movements of his heart and mind; and he felt above everything around him.
Five months before, in the lovely, shocking, refreshing winter, as a refugee from Africa, with no true place of his own to go back to, it had all seemed welcoming and blessed. The buildings hadn"t changed; the people hadn"t changed-all he could say was that he had learned to spot the hara.s.sed, heavy, middle-aged poor women from the east, two frontiers away. He remembered that time, that memory of his own happiness, very clearly. He didn"t reject it. It told him how far he had come.
That happiness, existing not in the real Berlin but in a special bubble-Sarojini"s apartment, Sarojini"s money, Sarojini"s conversation-couldn"t have endured. Twenty years before he would have wanted to hold on to that good time, would have tried to do, in Berlin, the city at the end of a narrow air corridor, what he had later done in Africa. It would have ended worse than Africa. He might have become like the Indian he met one day, an educated man in his thirties, with gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, who had come with high hopes to Berlin and was now a shiny-faced, fawning tramp in ragged clothes, with no place to sleep, his mind no longer whole, his breath very bad, a broken arm in a sling black with grime, complaining of his torments at the hands of young thugs.
In those five months he had come far. There had never been a time like that for him, when he had been without immediate anxiety, when he had not had to act with anyone, and when as in a fairy story he and his sister had become adults without suffering too much harm. He felt that everything he had thought and worked out in those five months was true. They issued out of a new serenity. Everything he had felt before, all the seemingly real longings that had taken him to Africa, were false. He felt no shame now; he could acknowledge everything; he saw that everything that had happened to him was a preparation for what was now to come.