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 café 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 class, 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 bagasse 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 bagasse 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 bagasse, wet, to get their twelve rupees.
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 bagasse 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 attitude 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 bagasse 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 assess.
Willie thought, “We will be doing the bagasse 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 passed 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 passport. Twenty-four rupees to a mark. We have a minimum charge of a hundred rupees. You have your passport?”
“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 companionship 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 friendship. 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 leadership 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, passes 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 bagasse 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 leadership—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 quantities 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 fore
st, 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 relationship with Bhoj Narayan, a relationship 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 shirt with big pockets at the sides and the brightly coloured thin towel on the shoulder, to town clothes, trousers and shirt 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 washing and, with the scattering of grubby blanket shawls, gave the gathering a village feel.
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