Part 3 (1/2)

Bhoj Narayan said, ”Honest labour.”

Willie didn't know how to deal with that. He didn't know whether Bhoj Narayan was speaking ironically, mocking the way an employer or factory foreman might have spoken, or whether he was being serious and encouraging, and meant that this hard labour of theirs in the baga.s.se yard was serving the cause and for that reason was to be cherished.

When Willie woke up the next day Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and it occurred to Willie that he had probably gone out to make some roundabout contact with the movement. Bhoj Narayan's att.i.tude was still that everything was all right, that in due course fresh money and new instructions would come; and Willie no longer raised the matter with him.

It was one o'clock, no later than Willie had awakened the day before. His body was getting used to the hours; with a mind racing ahead to alarm, he thought that perhaps in two or three days he would be spending most of the hours of daylight in stupefied sleep, his most alert hours the hours of his baga.s.se labour.

He went to the hotel he had used the previous day and ordered coffee and steamed rice-cakes. The routine was comforting. The undersized waiter with his thick oily hair was still in his very dirty white drill uniform. It was perhaps a little dirtier now, or much dirtier; at this stage of grey and black, degrees of dirt were hard to a.s.sess.

Willie thought, ”We will be doing the baga.s.se job for six more days. Perhaps then we'll be somewhere else. Perhaps I will never see this waiter in a clean uniform. I am sure that is how he sees his uniform: always white and clean and ironed. Perhaps if he sees his uniform as it is he will lose all his style. His life will change.”

He went afterwards to the post office, and tapped at the poste restante counter, to see whether by some miracle there was another letter from Sarojini. Pigeonholes against the dark wall were full of letters of various sizes. The clerk when he came didn't bother to look. He said, ”Nothing today. Perhaps in three days. That's when we get the air mail from Europe.”

He walked in the dingy business area of the little town. Monsoon and sun had mottled the walls and done away with their original colour. Only the signboards, shrill and competing, were new and bright with paint. He pa.s.sed a branch of the Bank of Baroda. It was very dark inside. The ceiling fans turned slowly, not disturbing the jagged paper piles on desks, and the clerks at the counter were behind a metal grille.

Willie said, ”Would it be possible to change some German marks here?”

”If you have a pa.s.sport. Twenty-four rupees to a mark. We have a minimum charge of a hundred rupees. You have your pa.s.sport?”

”Later. I will come back later.”

The idea of running away had come to him only the day before when he was writing to Sarojini. And he thought now, ”If I change a hundred marks I will get twenty-three hundred rupees after the charges. That will be enough to get me where I am thinking of going. I must guard those marks with my life. Bhoj Narayan must never know.”

Bhoj Narayan said nothing about what he had done in the morning. But he had begun to worry. And three days later, when only three days of their work in the sugar factory were left to them, he said to Willie, ”I feel there has been a calamity of some sort. We have to learn to live with the idea of calamity. I've never been let down before. And my feeling is that we should start thinking of making our way back to the camp in the teak forest.”

Willie thought, ”That's what you will be doing. You will be doing it on your own. I have my own plans. I will get away and make a fresh start. This is a mistake.”

The waiter was in a clean uniform that day. It altered him. He smiled and was full of welcome. There were the merest smudges on his pockets where for two or three hours he had been dipping his hands to fish out change.

Willie thought, ”I never thought I would see this. It must be a sign.” And when he went to the post office the man said, ”Something for you. I told you it was going to come in three days.”

Dear Willie, Our father is ill. Neither you nor I have been in touch with him for many years, and I suppose if you asked me I would have said that I was waiting for him to die, so that no one would be able to see what I had come from. I don't know how you feel, but my shame was very great, and my happiest day was when Wolf came and took me away from that dishonest mess of a family and an ashram. But this news of the illness of the old man makes me think of things from his point of view. I suppose with age one can begin to do things like that. I see how damaged he was, through no fault of his own, and I see how he did the best with what was available to him. We are of another generation and another world. We have another idea of human possibility and we must not judge him too harshly. My heart is telling me that I should go and see him, although I know in my bones that when I get there I will find the same old mess and will be ashamed of them all and pining to leave all over again.

Willie thought, ”The waiter's clean white uniform was a sign. That idea of changing a hundred marks into rupees and making my way back to the ashram was a bad idea. It is cowardly. It is against all my knowledge of the world. I must never think of it again.”

When he went back to the street of the tanners he said to Bhoj Narayan, ”You are right. We should start thinking of making our way back to the camp. If there has been a calamity they will need us all the more.”

They were very close then, and that afternoon in the town, and walking to the factory, and during the hours of work, and during the walk back just before dawn. And Willie for the first time felt something like companions.h.i.+p and affection for the dark man.

He thought, ”I have never had this feeling for any man. It is wonderful and enriching, this feeling of friends.h.i.+p. I have waited forty years for it. This business is working out.”

They were awakened about noon by a commotion outside their house: many harsh voices speaking at once. The harsh voices were the voices of the tanners, as though they had developed this special grinding quality of voice to compensate for the high smell in which they lived. The light around and above the door was dazzling. Willie was for looking out. Bhoj Narayan pulled him to one side. He said, ”Somebody is looking for us. It is better for me to deal with it. I will know how to talk.” He dressed and went out into the commotion, which immediately became more of a commotion, but then was stilled by the authority of his new voice. The voices moved away from the house, and a few minutes later Bhoj Narayan came back with a man in what Willie could now recognise as the peasant disguise people in the movement used.

Bhoj Narayan said, ”I never thought we were going to be let down. But we almost gave you up. We've been living on air for a week.”

The mock-peasant said, wiping his face with the long thin towel hanging over his shoulder, like an actor growing into his part, ”We've been under great pressure. The Greyhounds. We've lost some people. But you were not forgotten. I've brought you your money, and your instructions.”

Bhoj Narayan said, ”How much?”

”Five hundred rupees.”

”Let's go into the town. There are now three of us outsiders in one little room in the settlement, and we've drawn a lot of attention to ourselves. That could be unhealthy.”

The mock-peasant said, ”I had to ask. Perhaps I didn't use the right words. And they became suspicious.”

Bhoj Narayan said, ”You probably tried to be funny.”

He and the newcomer walked ahead. They all came together again at the hotel where Willie had his coffee and rice-cakes. The waiter's uniform was degrading fast.

Bhoj Narayan said to Willie, ”The leaders.h.i.+p are taking quite an interest in you. You've hardly been in the movement, but already they want you to be a courier.”

Willie said, ”What does a courier do?”

”He takes messages from one area to another, pa.s.ses on instructions. He's not a fighter, he never knows the whole situation, but he's important. He might do other things as well, depending on the situation. He might ferry arms from point A to point B. The point about a good courier is that he has to look OK everywhere. He must never stand out. And you do that very well, Willie. Have you ever watched a street? I have, watching for policemen in disguise, and it doesn't take long to spot the people in a street who don't belong. Even trained people. They can't help it. They give themselves away in twenty ways. But for some reason Willie looks at home everywhere. Even in the baga.s.se yard he looked at home.”

Willie said, ”It's the one thing I have worked at all my life: not being at home anywhere, but looking at home.”

FOUR.

Safe Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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