After an hour Willie thought, "I no longer know where I am. I don"t think I will be able to pick my way back. I am in their hands now."
They were now far from the railway town, far from the town. They were deep in the country, and it was getting dark. They came to a village. Even in the dark Willie could see the trimmed eaves of the thatched roof of the important family of the village. The village was a huddle of houses and huts, back to back and side to side, with narrow angular lanes. They walked past all the good houses and stopped at the edge, at an open thatched hut. The owner was an outcast, and very dark. One of the cricket people Joseph had talked about, created by centuries of slavery and abuse and bad food. Willie did not think him especially friendly. The thatch of his hut was rough, untrimmed. The hut was about ten feet by ten feet. Half of it was living s.p.a.ce and washing-up s.p.a.ce; the other half, with a kind of loft, was sleeping s.p.a.ce, for calves and hens as well as people.
Willie thought, "It"s pure nature now. Everything I have to do I will do in the bush."
Later they ate a kind of rice gruel, thick and salty.
Willie thought, "They"ve been living like this for centuries. I have been practising my yoga, so to speak, for a few days, and have become obsessed by it. They have been practising a profounder kind of yoga, every day, every meal. That yoga is their life. And of course there would be days when there would be nothing at all to eat, not even this gruel. Please, let me be granted the strength to bear what I am seeing."
And for the first time in his life Willie that evening fell asleep in his dirt. He and his guide rested all the next day in the hut while the owner went out to do his work. The next afternoon they began to walk again. They halted at night in another village, and spent the night again in a hut with a calf and hens. They ate rice flakes. There was no tea, no coffee, no hot drink. The water they drank was dirty, from a muddy brook.
Two days later they had left fields and villages behind and were in a teak forest. They came by moonlight that evening to a clearing in the forest. There were low olive-coloured plastic tents around a cleared area. There were no lights, no fires. In the moonlight shadows were black and sharp.
Willie"s guide said, "No talking. No questions."
They ate quite well that evening, groundnut, rice flakes, and wild meat. In the morning Willie considered his companions. They were not young. They were city people, people who would have had each man his own reason for dropping out of the workaday world and joining the guerrillas.
During the day Willie thought, "Kandapalli preached the Ma.s.s Line. Kandapalli wished the villagers and the poor to fight their own battles. I am not among the poor and the villagers in this camp. There has been some mistake. I have fallen among the wrong people. I have come to the wrong revolution. I don"t like these faces. And yet I have to be with them. I have to get a message out to Sarojini or to Joseph. But I don"t know how. I am completely in the hands of these people."
Two evenings later a rough man in military uniform came to him and said, "Tonight, man from Africa, you will do sentry duty."
That night Willie cried, tears of rage, tears of fear, and in the dawn the cry of the peac.o.c.k, after it had drunk from its forest pool, filled him with grief for the whole world.
THREE.
The Street of the Tanners
THERE WERE ABOUT forty or fifty people in the camp. Word went around, spread from newcomer to newcomer, that there were ten, even twenty, camps like this one in the liberated areas, the areas under the control of the guerrillas; and this gave a general confidence, even brought about a kind of swagger in the recruits, especially after olive uniforms were handed out. This happened on the fourth day. Somewhere, Willie thought, thinking back to what he had heard of the guerrillas in his part of Africa, some cloth-seller had been made to pay his dues to the movement in this cheap, lightweight olive cloth; and some village tailor had been asked to do some rough sewing. A peaked cloth cap came with the uniform; just above the visor was a star in red satin. The uniform and the cap spoke of drama, coming suddenly to forty or fifty lives; it also spoke rea.s.suringly of organisation; and it gave everyone a new, easy, sheltering ident.i.ty. forty or fifty people in the camp. Word went around, spread from newcomer to newcomer, that there were ten, even twenty, camps like this one in the liberated areas, the areas under the control of the guerrillas; and this gave a general confidence, even brought about a kind of swagger in the recruits, especially after olive uniforms were handed out. This happened on the fourth day. Somewhere, Willie thought, thinking back to what he had heard of the guerrillas in his part of Africa, some cloth-seller had been made to pay his dues to the movement in this cheap, lightweight olive cloth; and some village tailor had been asked to do some rough sewing. A peaked cloth cap came with the uniform; just above the visor was a star in red satin. The uniform and the cap spoke of drama, coming suddenly to forty or fifty lives; it also spoke rea.s.suringly of organisation; and it gave everyone a new, easy, sheltering ident.i.ty.
It was a training camp. The sentry, not speaking, making no sound, woke them up one by one while it was still dark. The rule of the camp was that there was to be no sound and no light at night. Afterwards there came the calls of the noisy peac.o.c.ks and other forest birds, fully a mile off, one bird in particular giving strident, desperate-sounding calls of alarm when it thought that some predator was getting too close to its eggs. At about six there was the roll call, and then for three hours they jogged and did physical exercises and sometimes practised crawling on the ground with a gun in their hands. For breakfast they had peanuts and rice flakes. And then they were lectured on guerrilla tactics. They were to make no sound when they were in the forest; they were to communicate by making bird calls, and they spent much time practising these bird calls. They were all very serious; no one laughed when the bird whistles went wrong. After lunch-which could mean deer or frogs or goat: this was not a vegetarian movement-they rested until mid-afternoon; and then they drilled and exercised for an hour and a half. The worst time then followed: the long evening, eleven hours long, without lights or proper speech, everyone talking only in whispers.
Willie thought, "I have never known such boredom. Ever since I have come to India I have known these terrible nights of boredom. I suppose it is a kind of training, a kind of asceticism, but for what I am not sure. I must look upon it as another chamber of experience. I must give no sign to these people that I am not absolutely with them."
When he was staying at the Neo Anand Bhavan he had bought some pre-stamped air-letter sheets. He began one hot afternoon in his oppressive plastic tent to write a letter to Sarojini. It was the only time he could write.
Dear Sarojini, I think something terrible has happened. I am not with the people we talked about. I don"t know how it"s happened, but I believe I am with Kandapalli"s enemies.
He thought that was too open. He crossed out Kandapalli"s name, and then decided that it was too dangerous for him to write to Sarojini. He put the letter aside, in the kind of canvas backpack he had been given, and looked out through the flap at the white, melancholy light of the forest clearing and the exercise ground.
He thought, "This light denies everything. It denies beauty. It denies human possibility. Africa was gentler, as Joseph suggested. Perhaps I have been too long away. But I mustn"t think too much along those lines. The cause we talked about in Berlin is still good and true. That I know."
The rule in the camp, enunciated by the leader-a man of about forty, who looked like a businessman or civil servant, and had possibly been a member of the cadets at his school-the rule was that the recruits should not ask too many questions of their fellows. They should simply accept them as wearers of the red star. And Willie lost himself in conjecture about the people around him. They were all people in their late thirties or early forties, Willie"s age, and he wondered what weakness or failure had caused them in mid-life to leave the outer world and to enter this strange chamber. He had been away from India too long. He couldn"t a.s.sess the backgrounds of the people around him. He could only try to read the faces and the physiques: the too-full, sensual mouth in some speaking of some kind of s.e.xual perversion, the hard mean eyes in others, the bruised-seeming eyes of yet others that spoke of hard or abused childhoods and tormented adult lives. That was as far as he could read. Among these people seeking in various ways to revenge themselves on the world, he was among strangers.
On the tenth or eleventh night there was a great disturbance in the camp. The sentry panicked and began to shout, and all the camp was filled with alarm.
Somebody shouted, "The Greyhounds!"
That was the name of the special anti-guerrilla force within the police. They used guerrilla tactics: they were said to specialise in speed, secrecy, and surprise, the three S"s, and they attacked first. This was their well-publicised reputation, and a number of terrified recruits ran out from their plastic tents and made for the forest.
It was a false alarm. Some animal had stumbled into the camp and frightened the sentry.
Gradually then people were called back, shame-faced, many of them only in their underclothes, and angry, full of a new rage.
Willie thought, "Until tonight they thought they were the only ones with guns and training and discipline, the only ones with a programme. It made them brave. Now they have an idea of an enemy, and they are not so brave. They are only meaner. They will be very nasty tomorrow. I will have to be careful with them."
Nothing was said by the leader that night. He was concerned in his businessman"s or bureaucrat"s way only to restore order. At dawn the routine of the camp was as before. It was only after breakfast (peanuts, rice flakes, the usual), and when the "military theory" cla.s.s was to begin, that the leader spoke to the camp; and then he spoke not as a man wishing to enforce discipline, but as a man fearful of a ma.s.s desertion, fearful of violence and the break-up of his camp. He knew his audience. At the beginning of his talk they were restive, like people who had been found out and in childlike pique had returned to their old bruised ident.i.ties, ready to forgo the shelter and comfort of their olive uniforms and the red satin stars on their caps, which only a few days before had appeared to make a new life so easy for them. They were waiting for rebuke, foreheads furrowed, eyes narrow and mean, lips pursed, cheeks puffed out: middle-aged men full of childhood pique but capable of adult rage. They were not going to put up with rebuke. When it became clear that the leader had no intention of mocking them they gradually calmed down.
Willie thought, "Kandapalli was right. If I was concerned with making a revolution for the defeated and the insulted, if like Kandapalli I could cry easily at the thought of people"s unrevenged sorrows over the centuries, these are not the men I would want with me. I would go to the poor themselves."
The leader said, "The sentry made a mistake last night and gave us all a big fright. I don"t think the sentry should be blamed. He is not used to the forest and wild animals, and too much was placed anyway on the shoulders of one man. From tonight we will have two sentries. But what happened last night shows how important it is for us at all times to be on our guard. We must always imagine that the enemy is observing us, and we must expect him at every turn of every road. Something is always to be learned from a misadventure, and as a result of last night we will develop our exercises. We will attempt over the next few days to get everyone familiar with certain defensive procedures. These procedures should become second nature to us all, at any time of day or night, and that will help in the next emergency."
And for the next week or so military theory was not the boy-scout business of crawling on the ground with a gun and making bird whistles to the man in front. They practised protecting the camp. In one exercise they established a perimeter around the camp; in the other they fanned out far on two sides to prepared positions and waited to ambush any a.s.sault party.
Willie thought, "But what will happen when battle is joined, when the other side attacks? We are not being trained for that at all. This is just the beginning of military theory. This is nothing. All these people will be good for is to fire a gun at someone who can"t fire back. And that is really what they want."
But there was calm in the camp. Everyone was now waiting for orders.
The leader came to Willie one day and said, "Headquarters is taking an interest in you. They are detailing you for a special job. You will be leaving in two days. Get your things ready. You will go to the town of Dhulipur. Bhoj Narayan will go with you. He was the sentry who gave the false alarm. But that"s not why we are sending him. We are sending him because he is one of the best. We have rented a room for the two of you. We will give you a hundred and fifty rupees. At the end of two weeks we will send you more. You are to stay in your room for further instructions."
As the leader spoke Willie found it easy to imagine him in a double-breasted suit. He was a man of the comfortable middle cla.s.s, in his forties, fluent, experienced, easy in manner, confident, rather like a university teacher or a box-wallah executive for a big company. Willie could imagine him as the boy sergeant of the cadets at his school, playing the non-commissioned officer to the junior army officer who came twice a week to train and inspect the cadets. What had caused him to drop out of that easy life? Was it too great a security, was it a conviction that it would be easy for him to return to that world? Willie studied his face, looking for a clue in the smooth skin, the bland features, the too-quiet eyes, and then the idea, transmitted from the man himself, came to him. "His wife despises him, and has been cuckolding him for years. This is how he intends to revenge himself. What mischief is this elegant man going to cause?"
IT WAS A DIFFICULT journey to Dhulipur. It took more than a day. Willie put on his civilian clothes (themselves theatrical, a semi-peasant disguise), took some rations from the camp, hung the long fine peasant towel over his shoulder, and put on his leather slippers. They were still new. The slippers were to protect him from scorpions and other dangerous creatures, but it was hard for Willie, too used to socks, to walk in slippers. For much of the time his bare heels slipped off the shiny leather and trod the ground. Bhoj Narayan knew the way. First they walked out of the teak forest. That took more than three hours. Then they came to villages and little fields. journey to Dhulipur. It took more than a day. Willie put on his civilian clothes (themselves theatrical, a semi-peasant disguise), took some rations from the camp, hung the long fine peasant towel over his shoulder, and put on his leather slippers. They were still new. The slippers were to protect him from scorpions and other dangerous creatures, but it was hard for Willie, too used to socks, to walk in slippers. For much of the time his bare heels slipped off the shiny leather and trod the ground. Bhoj Narayan knew the way. First they walked out of the teak forest. That took more than three hours. Then they came to villages and little fields.
There was a peasant or a farmer Bhoj Narayan knew in one village, and to his thatched house they went in the afternoon when it was hot. The man was out, but his wife was welcoming. Willie and Bhoj Narayan sheltered in the open secondary hut, with cool thatched eaves that hung welcomingly low, shutting out much of the glare. Willie asked the woman of the house for sattoo, for which he had developed a taste; and he and Bhoj Narayan moistened it with a little water and ate and were content. The sattoo was made from millet. Before the sun went down the master of the house came, dark and sweated from his labours. He asked them to stay for the night in the open hut where they were. The calves were brought in, with their fodder. Rice gruel was offered to Willie and Bhoj Narayan. Willie was for accepting, but Bhoj Narayan said no, the millet sattoo was quite enough. Willie allowed himself to be guided by that. And then it was night, the long night that began when it was dark, with the fields outside where village people did everything they had to before settling down to sleep.
Early in the morning they left, to walk the five miles to the bus station. There they waited for a bus; when it came it took them to a railway station; and there they waited for a pa.s.senger train to take them to the town of Dhulipur. They arrived in the afternoon.
Bhoj Narayan was now very much in command. He was a big dark man with broad shoulders and a slender waist. He had not talked much to Willie so far, following the rule of the camp, but now in the town he became more communicative as he began looking for the district in which the room had been hired for them. They looked and looked. When they asked, people looked at them in a strange way. At length, disbelievingly, they came to the tanners" area. The smell of decomposing flesh and dog excrement was awful.
Willie said, "At least no one will come looking for us here."
Bhoj Narayan said, "They are testing us. They wish to see whether we will break. Do you think you can stand it?"
Willie said, "It is possible to stand anything. We are tougher than we think. The people who live here have to stand it."
The house in which the room had been rented for them was a small low house with a red-tile roof in a street of small low houses. There was an open gutter outside, and the walls of the rented room (shown them by one of the cricket people Joseph had talked about) had the same mottled multi-coloured quality as the walls of the Neo Anand Bhavan, as though all kinds of liquid impurities had worked their way up like a special kind of toxic damp.
Willie thought, "I must do something to fight this smell. I must try to overcome it mentally."
But he couldn"t. And then, as he had done at various points in his recent journey (and just as sometimes in the past, feeling lost in Africa, unable to pick his way back to safety or to what he would be easy with, and with no one to confess his anxiety to, he had taken to counting the different beds he had slept in since he was born, to keep track of things), so now in the street of the tanners he began re-living the stages of his descent in the past year. From the desolation and real scarcities of a broken-down estate house in an abandoned Portuguese colony in Africa; to the flat in Charlottenburg in Berlin which at first had seemed to him a place looted and bare and unkempt and cold, speaking of postwar neglect, and full of earlier ghosts he could scarcely imagine; to the airport town in India, to the Riviera Hotel, to the Neo Anand Bhavan, to the guerrilla camp in the teak forest, and now this shock of the tanneries in a small town he didn"t know and wouldn"t be able to find on a map: separate chambers of experience and sensibility, each one a violation with which he in the end would live as though it was a complete world.
It was in this great stench of the street of the tanners that that evening he and Bhoj Narayan became close. As though it had needed that particular calamity (as it appeared) to bring them together. They went out walking, away from the smoky flambeaux of the tanneries, to the dim fluorescent lights of what to Willie now seemed the purer town, the bazaar (its flies now asleep) and the area around the railway station.
Willie said, "They"ve given us one hundred and fifty rupees for fourteen days. That"s ten rupees a day. In Berlin you wouldn"t be able to buy a cup of coffee with that. Do you think they expect us to spend our own money?"
Bhoj Narayan said, with a touch of sternness, "We should do what they say. They have their reasons."
And Willie understood that Bhoj Narayan was a true man of the movement, the man in charge of this mission, and had to be heeded.
They went to the bazaar and spent five rupees on dal, cauliflower, and pickles; and another two rupees on coffee. They walked then in the half darkness of the town, talking of their past, each man identifying himself in a way that hadn"t been permitted in the camp. Willie spoke of England and his eighteen years in Africa.
Bhoj Narayan said, "I heard something about that. We must seem like nothing to you."
Willie said, "It seems more exciting than it was. Words can give wrong ideas. The names of places can give wrong ideas. They have too many grand a.s.sociations. When you are in the place itself, London, Africa, everything can seem ordinary. At school we learned a little comic poem by William Blake. I don"t think I remember it all. There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he. He ran away to Scotland, The people there to see. There he found that the ground was as hard, And the cherry was as red, As in England. So he stood in his shoes and he wondered There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he. He ran away to Scotland, The people there to see. There he found that the ground was as hard, And the cherry was as red, As in England. So he stood in his shoes and he wondered. That was me. That was why I came looking for you. I was unhappy where I was. I had a strong idea that my place was in this world here."
In the darkness as they walked Willie saw the post office. He thought, "I must try to pick my way back here tomorrow."
Bhoj Narayan said his ancestors had been peasants. They had been driven out of their land and village by a great famine at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a backward caste. They had gone to a new British-built railway town, and there his grandfather had found work of some sort. His father had finished school and found a job in the state transport system. He had then become an accountant. His mother"s family had had the same kind of history. They had a cultured background. They were musicians. But they were of the same backward caste.
Willie said, "You are telling me a success story. Why are you in this movement? Why are you throwing everything away? You are a middle-cla.s.s man now. Things can only get better for you and your family."
Bhoj Narayan said, "Why are you in it?"
"A good question."
Bhoj Narayan said with a little irritation, "But why?"
Willie, backing away from his earlier evasiveness, and the social distance it implied, said, "A long story. I suppose it"s the story of my life. I suppose it"s the way the world is made."
"Same here. With people of feeling things can never be cut and dried. When you buy a machine you get a book of instructions. Men are not like that. I am proud of my family, proud of what they have done in the last hundred years. But at the same time I"ll tell you. When in the old days I heard about a landlord being killed, my heart sang. I wanted all the feudals to be killed. I wanted them all to be hanged and stay hanging until the flesh fell off their skeletons."
Willie recognised Joseph"s language.
Bhoj Narayan said, "And I didn"t want others to do the killing. I wanted to be there myself. I wanted to show myself to them before they were killed. I wanted to see the surprise and fright in their eyes."
Willie thought, "Is this true? Or is he trying to impress me?" He considered the features of the dark man, tried to imagine his family, tried to imagine the powerless past. He said, "I believe the famine that drove your people out of their village was the famine that drove my great-grandfather, my father"s grandfather, out of their ancient temple. Isn"t it strange? We are linked more closely than we thought. And I discovered some years ago that Rudyard Kipling wrote a story about that famine. A love story, an English love story."
Bhoj Narayan was not interested. They walked back towards the street of the tanners, to undress and wait for the night to pa.s.s; and Willie was locked then in that new chamber of consciousness, of smell and awfulness, but with the conviction that he would soon be living in it as in a complete world, and would survive.
In the morning he picked his way to the post office. On the old single-page air letter that he had not finished-where he had scratched out Kandapalli"s name and then had been worried about going on-he wrote: I believe I am among the enemies of the man we talked about. I am not master of my movements. I will be staying here for two weeks. Please write me at the poste restante of this town. This letter will take one week to get to you. Your letter will take a week to get to me. I am depending on you.
He and Bhoj Narayan went to the bazaar at midday. The food was fresher at midday than in the evening. They ate with relish and then, as they walked about the town, Bhoj Narayan told more of his story. There was no need for Willie to probe.
Bhoj Narayan said, "I thought in my second year at the university I should give up my studies and join the guerrillas. I used to go with some friends to the tank on the edge of the town. I suppose it"s my old background, but I"ve always liked green. Gra.s.s and trees. It"s the way the world should be. We used to talk about what we might do. About joining the guerrillas. But we didn"t know how to go about doing anything. I could only think of approaching one of our teachers. He said he didn"t know how to put me in touch with the guerrillas. But he did. A man from the engineering department of the town came to see me at the students" hostel one day. He gave me a date when he would be coming to take me to see the people I wanted to see. I promised to come with my friends. But the friends didn"t turn up when the time came. They were too frightened. They were too worldly. They loved life too much. So I went on my own. That was how it began. That was three years ago."
"So it"s worked out for you?"
"It"s worked out. I"ve lost a couple of friends. It took me six months to get used to it. I also miss the jokes. In the movement you can"t make jokes. And you can"t make jokes with the peasants. They absolutely don"t like it. Sometimes I feel they will kill you if they think you are teasing them. You have always to say literally what you mean. If you are used to the other way of talking, it"s not always easy."
SO THE DAYS pa.s.sed, ten rupees a day; and with the companionship of Bhoj it was not disagreeable. But as their money dwindled, and no replacement money came, and no instructions, Willie began to be anxious. pa.s.sed, ten rupees a day; and with the companionship of Bhoj it was not disagreeable. But as their money dwindled, and no replacement money came, and no instructions, Willie began to be anxious.
Bhoj Narayan said, "We must ration our money now. We have thirty rupees left. We must spend five rupees a day on food. When we start doing that, ten rupees a day will seem like luxury. It will be good discipline."
"Do you think they have forgotten us?"
"They have not forgotten us."
On the fifteenth day, when they had been living on five rupees a day for three days, Willie went to the post office. A letter from Sarojini was waiting for him in the poste restante. The sight of the German stamp lifted his heart.
Dear Willie, I don"t know how to tell you. I suppose when one is trying to arrange things long distance mistakes in communication can occur. I don"t know whether Joseph is responsible or whether somebody else is responsible. The movement, as you know, has split, and what has happened is that you are among psychopaths. In every underground movement, and I mean every underground movement, there is an element of criminality. I have seen plenty of them and I know. I should have told you when you were here, but I thought you were an intelligent man and would find out on your own and know how to deal with it when the time came. I don"t have to tell you to be careful. Some of the people around you are what is known in the movement as action men. That means they have killed, and are ready to kill again. They can be boastful and wild. The comfort is that you are all serving the same cause in the end, and the time may come one day when you may be able to cross over and join Kandapalli"s people.
He crumpled up the letter and threw it, with its precious German stamp, on a pile of wet and rotting garbage outside the bazaar. Inside the bazaar Bhoj Narayan said, "This is our last day with money."
Willie said, "I feel they have forgotten us."
"We have to show our resourcefulness. We must start looking for work after we have eaten. There would be part-time work in a place like this."
"What work can we do?"
"That"s the trouble. We have no skill. But we will find something."
They ate small portions of rice and dal in leaf plates. When they came out Bhoj said, "Look. Black smoke in the sky a few miles away from here. Chimneys. Sugar factories. It"s the grinding season. Let us have a walk."
They walked to the edge of the town and then they walked through the semi-countryside to the factory, the chimneys getting taller all the time. Trucks loaded with canes pa.s.sed them all the time, and ahead of them were bullock carts also loaded with canes. It was chaos in the factory yard, but they found a man of authority. Bhoj Narayan said, "Leave the talking to me." And five minutes later he came back and said, "We have a job for a week. From ten at night to three in the morning. We will be picking up wet baga.s.se after the canes have been crushed. We will be taking the baga.s.se to a drying area. When the stuff is dry they use it as fuel. But that"s not our problem. Twelve rupees a day, a good deal less than the official minimum wage. You wouldn"t be able to buy a cup of coffee in Berlin. But we are not in Berlin, and in some situations you don"t argue. I told the foreman we were refugees from another country. It was my way of telling him that we weren"t going to make trouble. Now we should walk back to the street of the tanners and rest for the night. It will be a long walk there again and a long walk back in the morning."
And so for Willie the room in the street of the tanners changed again, and became a place of rest before labour. And became, early next morning, just before six, a place where, having walked back in the darkness and bathed off the sticky, sugary baga.s.se wet from their bodies at the communal tap (fortunately running at that hour), Willie and Bhoj Narayan fell into deep and exhausted sleep, in a kind of brutish contentment.
Willie woke from time to time to the physical aches of his over-exercised body, and then in his half-slumber he saw again the ghostly half-lit scene in the factory yard with the ragged cricket people, his fellow workers, for whom this nightly labour was not a joke or a little out-of-hours drama, a break in routine, but a matter of life and death, walking to and fro in a kind of slow h.e.l.lish silhouetted dance to the flat wide concrete drying place with small baskets of wet baga.s.se on their heads, and then with empty baskets in their hands, with others in the distance taking the night"s dried baga.s.se to feed the factory furnace, the flames from the baga.s.se leaping an extraordinary beautiful turquoise and casting an extra pale green glow on the small dark bodies, shining and wasted: about sixty men in all doing what ten men with wheelbarrows could have done in the same time, and what two simple machines would have done with little fuss.
He woke just before one, reflecting, as he looked at it, that his Rolex watch was like a memory, and a need, of another world. Bhoj Narayan was still sleeping. Willie didn"t wish to disturb him. As soon as he could he went out and made for the town away from the street of the tanners. He had an air-letter form and a Pentel pen. He looked for what was known in small towns like this as a hotel, but was only the roughest kind of cafe or tea shop. Bhoj Narayan had discouraged this kind of adventure. Willie found his hotel. He asked for coffee and steamed rice-cakes. It came with two kinds of chutney and two kinds of dal, and it seemed like the height of luxury, though a month before, this hotel, where flies, nimbler than the people, swarmed everywhere and fed on everything, would have worried him. The lean waiter, physically just above the cricket cla.s.s, with thick oily hair, wore a tunic suit in white drill. It was black and dirty wherever it could be dirty, especially around the bulging side pockets, as though that kind of dirt was a mark of service and hard work. Clearly only one clean suit a week was allowed to the waiter, and this day was near the end of the allotted week.
The waiter wiped the marble table dry for Willie, the flies swarming up in irritation, making for Willie"s and the waiter"s hair; and Willie took out his air-letter and wrote.
Dear Sarojini, I don"t have to tell you that I came into this thing with the purest of hearts and the wish to do what with your teaching and the promptings of my own mind had begun to seem to me to be right. But now I must tell you I feel I am lost. I don"t know what cause I am serving, and why I am doing what I do. Right now I am working in a sugar factory, carting wet baga.s.se from ten at night to three in the morning for twelve rupees a day. What this has to do with the cause of revolution I cannot see. I see only that I have put myself in other people"s hands. I did that once before, you will remember, when I went to Africa. I intended never to do it again, but I find now that I have. I am with a senior man of the movement here. I am not easy with him, and I don"t think he is easy with me. I have run away from the room we share to write this letter. I believe he is one of the action men you wrote me about. He told me that the peasants don"t like jokes, and can kill people who they feel are teasing them. I feel the same is true of him. He asked me why I had joined the movement. I couldn"t of course tell him the whole story in two sentences and I said, "Good question." As though I was in London or Africa or Berlin. He didn"t like that, and I couldn"t laugh it off. I have made a few more stumbles like that with him, and the result is I am afraid to talk freely to him, and he resents this. He is the leader. He has been in the movement for three years. I have to do what I am told, and I feel that in a few weeks I have lost my freedom for no good reason that I can see. I am thinking of running away. I have two hundred marks from the Berlin money. I suppose I can change this at a bank, if they don"t get too suspicious, and then I can go to a railway station, and pick my way back to our family house. But that would be a kind of death for me, too. I don"t want to return to that horrible family unhappiness. I am sorry to be writing like this. I don"t know how long I will be in this town and whether it will be worth your while to write me at the poste restante. I will give you a new address as soon as I can.
Bhoj Narayan was still in his canvas cot when Willie got back to the street of the tanners. Willie thought, "I am sure he knows where I"ve been and what I"ve been doing."
To avoid questions, he said, "I went to the town and had a coffee and an idli. I needed it."
Bhoj Narayan said, "It"s only twelve rupees a night at the sugar factory. Go easy. There might be hard days ahead."
Willie, sleepy again after his breakfast, undressed and got into his little cot. The thought of the long day weighed on him, and the thought of the labour of the night.
He thought, "Is there a point to all of this? There is a point for Bhoj Narayan. He knows what is being planned and how what we are doing here fits in. He has complete faith in it. I don"t have that faith. All I need now is the strength to go on, the strength just for tonight. Let me pray that that strength comes to me from some quarter, some very deep part of my spirit. That is how I must start living now, one day at a time, or one half-day at a time. I have sunk to the depths. I thought this street of the tanners was the limit. But the ghostly baga.s.se workers have taken me down several notches, and they will be there tonight again, surviving in all their wretchedness. Perhaps I needed to know about these true survivors. Perhaps this exposure to human nullity will do me good, will make me see more clearly."
He surrendered to pictures of the turquoise flames on the small bodies of the night workers. The pictures became distorted, lost their sequence, and he fell asleep. The light had almost gone when he awakened. Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and he was thankful for that. He dressed and went to the bazaar and had a little leaf-cup of curried chickpeas. It was like excess, after the morning"s feast. It filled him up, and he was able when he came back to the room to wait patiently until eight, when Bhoj Narayan came back and it was time for them to start walking to the sugar factory.
And somehow, as if in answer to his need, the strength came to him for the labour of the night. What had been new and debilitating the previous night, in labour and images, was routine on this second night; that helped. After an hour (the Rolex marking off the time, as in his other life or lives) the comforting idea came to him that it was like doing a long and difficult drive in Africa. The thought of it was worrying beforehand, but once you started it became quite all right, quite mechanical: the road itself seemed to take you where you were going. All you had to do was to be calm and allow yourself to go.
Afterwards they stood in line with the others, sweated, coated with the sticky grey baga.s.se, wet, to get their twelve rupees.