The elder brother’s wife, who on the previous occasion had worn her best sari, with the gold fringe, but was now wearing only a peasant woman’s skirt, said, “Maim him, sir. Take away an arm or a leg. He will still be able to sit at a loom and do something. Please don’t kill him. We will become beggars if you do.” She sat on the floor and held Bhoj Narayan’s legs.
Willie thought, “The more she begs and pleads, the angrier he will get. He wants to see the fear in the man’s eyes.”
And when the shot was fired, and Raja’s head became a mess, the elder brother’s eyes popped as he stared at the ground. That was how they left him, the elder brother, staring and pop-eyed next to the home-made looms.
All the way back to their base they were grateful for the stutter of the scooter.
A week later, when they met face-to-face again, Bhoj Narayan said, “Give it six months. In my experience that’s what it takes.”
FOR SOME WEEKS afterwards Willie marvelled at himself. He thought, “When I first met Bhoj Narayan I didn’t like him. I was uneasy with him. And then somehow when we were together in the street of the tanners, and I was very low, I found a companionship with him. That companionship was necessary to me. It helped me through a bad patch, when I was sinking into old ways of feeling, old ways of wishing to run away, and that feeling of companionship is now what is uppermost when I think of him. I know that the other Bhoj Narayan, the man I distrusted, is still there, but now I have to look very hard for him. The later man is the man I know and understand. I know how he thinks and why he does what he does. I carry the scene in the house with the looms in my head. I see the scooter in the yard next to the spinning wheel with the old bicycle rim. I see that poor elder brother with the popping eyes, and understand his pain. And yet I do not think I will willingly betray Bhoj Narayan to anyone. I do not think there is any point. I haven’t worked out why I feel there is no point. I could say various things about justice and people on the other side. But it wouldn’t be true. The fact is I have arrived at a new way of feeling. And it is amazing that it should have happened just after fourteen or fifteen months of this strange life. The first night, in the camp in the teak forest, I was disturbed by the faces of the new recruits. Later I was disturbed by the faces at the meetings in the safe houses. I feel I understand them all now.”
THEY WENT ON with the slow, careful labour of taking supplies to where a new front was to be opened, working like ants digging out a nest in the ground or taking leaf fragments to that nest, each worker content and important with his minute task, carrying a speck of earth or a bitten-off scrap of a leaf.
Bhoj Narayan and Willie went to a small railway town to check that the deliveries there were secure. This town was one of the places where Willie picked up his poste restante letters. He had last visited it with Raja, and had had the feeling then—from the too familiar, too friendly clerk—that he had been overdoing the trips to the post office in Raja’s scooter and had been making himself too noticeable there as the man who got letters from Germany. Until then he had thought of the poste restante as quite safe; very few people even knew of the facility. But now he had a feeling of foreboding. He examined all the dangers that might be connected with the poste restante; he dismissed them all. But the foreboding remained. He thought, “This is because of Raja. This is how a bad death lays a curse on us.”
The railway workers’ colony was an old settlement, from the 1940s perhaps, of flat-roofed two-roomed and three-roomed concrete houses set down tightly together in dirt roads without sanitation. It might have been presented at the time as a work of social conscience, a way of doing low-cost housing, and it might just about have looked passable in the idealising fine line (and fine lettering) of the architect’s elevation. Thirty-five years on, the thing created was awful. Concrete had grown dingy, black for two or three feet above ground; window frames and doors had been partially eaten away. There were no trees, no gardens, only in some houses little hanging pots of basil, an herb associated with religion and used in some religious rites. There were no sitting areas or playing areas or washing areas or clothes-drying areas; and what had once been clean and straight and bare in the architect’s drawing was now full of confused lines, electric wires thick and thin dipping from one leaning pole to the next, and the confusion was fully peopled: people compelled here by their houses to live out of doors in all seasons; as though you could do anything with people here, give them anything to live in, fit them in anywhere.
The safe house was in one of the back streets. It seemed perfect cover.
Bhoj Narayan said, “Stay about a hundred feet behind me.”
And Willie dawdled, his heels slipping off the smooth leather of his village sandals and trailing on the dirt of the street.
Some scrawny boys were playing a rough kind of cricket with a very dirty tennis ball, a bat improvised from the central rib of a coconut branch, and a box for a wicket. Willie saw four or five balls bowled: there was no style or true knowledge of the game.
Willie caught up with Bhoj Narayan at the house.
Bhoj Narayan said, “There’s no one there.”
They went around to the back. Bhoj Narayan banged on the flimsy door, which was rotten at the bottom where rain had splashed on it for many seasons. It would have been easy to kick it in. But sharp, acrid voices from three houses at the back called out to them: women and men sitting in the narrow shadow of their houses.
Bhoj Narayan said, “I am looking for my brother-in-law. His father is in hospital.”
A wretchedly thin woman in a green sari that showed up all her bones said, “There’s no one there. Some people came for him one morning and he went away with them.”
Bhoj Narayan asked, “When was that?”
The woman said, “Two weeks ago. Three weeks.”
Bhoj Narayan said under his breath to Willie, “I think we should get out of here.” To the woman he said, “We have to take the message to other relatives.”
They walked back through the parody of the cricket game.
Bhoj Narayan said, “We are still paying for Raja. Everybody he got to know with us is compromised. I let my guard down, I liked him so much. We have to give up this town. We are being watched even as we walk here.”
Willie said, “I don’t think it was Raja. It might have been Raja’s brother, and he didn’t really know what he was doing.”
“Raja or Raja’s brother, we ’ve taken a bad knock. We ’ve lost a year’s work. Lakhs of rupees in weapons. We were building up a squad here. Heaven knows what has happened in other sectors.”
They walked away from the railway colony to the older town.
Willie said, “I would like to go to the post office. There might be a letter from my sister. And since we are not coming back here this might be my last chance for a while to hear from her.”
The post office was a small, much-decorated British-built stone building. It had ochre or magnolia walls edged with raised masonry painted red; it had deep, low stone eaves in the Indian style; and a semi-circular stone or masonry panel at the top of the façade gave the date 1928. Obliquely opposite across the thoroughfare was a tea shop.
Willie said, “Let’s have a tea or a coffee.”
When the coffee came Willie said, “I have to tell you this. I have become nervous of the post office. I came here too often with Raja. You know how he was. Itchy feet. He always wanted to be on the road. I would come here even when I knew that there wouldn’t be a letter from my sister. You could say that sometimes I came with Raja only for the company and the ride. The clerk became friendly. It was nice in the beginning, being known. Then it worried me.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “I will go for you.”
He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down, and made his way across the bright road to the post office doorway, dark below the low stone eaves. He was swallowed up in the gloom and at the same time Willie saw four or five men in varying costumes detaching themselves from the fixed postures in which they had been sit
ting around the dark mouth of the post office. A second later these men, all together now, were hurrying Bhoj Narayan to what had looked like a taxi but now showed itself to be an unmarked police car.
After the car drove away Willie paid for the coffee and crossed the bright road to the poste restante counter. The clerk was new.
He said to the clerk, “What was all that about?”
The clerk said, with his too-formal English, “Some malefactor. The police were waiting for him for a week.”
Willie said, “Can I buy stamps at this counter?”
“You do that at the front.”
Willie thought, “I must leave. I must leave fast. I must go to the railway station. I have to go back to the base as fast as I can.”
And then, with every new thought that came during his fast walk in the afternoon sun, he understood his predicament more and more clearly. Sarojini’s letter would now be in the hands of the police. Perhaps earlier letters as well. Everything was now known about him. He was now on the police list. He no longer had the protection of anonymity. And it was only many minutes later, after he had digested these new facts about himself, that he began to live again those very simple two or three minutes of Bhoj Narayan’s walk and capture. It was Bhoj Narayan’s boast that he knew how to study a street, to see who didn’t belong. The gift had failed him at the end. Or he hadn’t thought to use it. Perhaps he hadn’t understood the danger. Perhaps he had been too disturbed by what had happened before in the railway colony.
At the railway station he saw from the dust-blown, faded black-and-white boards that the next train going in the direction he wished to go was an express and not a passenger train. Passenger trains were slow, stopping at all the stations on the way. The express train would take him many miles beyond where he would normally get off. It would commit him to walking at night through villages and across fields, exciting dogs in villages and birds in open areas, being always at the centre of a great commotion; or he would have to ask at some peasant’s or outcast’s hut at the edge of a village to be put up for the night, and take his chance in an open shed, with the chickens and the calves.
The express train was due in just over an hour. The idle thought came to him that the Rolex on his wrist would give him away to anyone on the lookout for a fugitive with German connections. Then that simulated anxiety became real, and he began to wonder whether he had been followed from the town, whether some expert police street-watcher hadn’t spotted him as an intruder, not a local, in the tea shop opposite the post office.
There was a way at ground level over the tracks to the platform at the other side. This way was busy. There was also an old timber bridge, with a walkway between high half-walls (high, perhaps, to prevent people throwing themselves in front of trains). There were only half a dozen people there. They were young people; they were on the bridge for the adventure and the view. Willie went and stood with them and, knowing that only his head and shoulders showed, tried to become a watcher of crowds. In no time he was fascinated, seeing how unselfconscious people were in their movements, how unique each man’s movements were, and how much of the person they revealed.
He saw nothing to worry him, and when the express came in, and the crowd appeared to roar, and the hucksters put an extra edge into their cries that lifted them above the general roar, he ran down and forced himself into a third-class compartment that was already quite packed. The open windows had horizontal metal bars; there was fine blown dust everywhere; everything was warm, and everyone smelled of old clothes and tobacco. When the express moved off again into the sunlight he thought, “Luck has been with me. And for the first time here I have been on my own.”
Not far from the passenger-train halt where he would have preferred to get off, the track had a sharp bend. Even express trains slowed down there, and Willie, feeling that luck was now with him, was planning to jump off the express at that point, to save himself a long night’s march in unfamiliar territory. That point was about two hours away.
He thought, “I am on my own. Bhoj Narayan is no longer with me. I suppose I will have a rough time with some people now.”
He considered the people in his compartment. They would have been like the poor Bhoj Narayan and his family had risen out of in two or three generations. All that work and ambition had now been wasted; all that further possibility had been thrown away. He had told Bhoj Narayan, when they had talked of these things a long time before, and before they had become friends, that Bhoj Narayan’s family story was a success story. But Bhoj Narayan had not replied, had not appeared to hear. The same was true, though in a much smaller way, of Raja’s upward movement from the weaver caste. That, too, was full of further possibility, and that, too, had come to nothing. What was the point of those lives? What was the point of what could be seen as those two suicides?
Many minutes later, a little nearer the jumping-off point when the track curved, Willie thought, “I am wrong. I am looking at it from my own point of view. Everything was the point for Bhoj Narayan. He felt himself to be a man. That was what the movement and even his suicide—if we think of it like that—gave him.”
And then a little later, almost before he jumped, Willie thought, “But that is romantic and wrong. It takes much more to be a man. Bhoj Narayan was choosing a short cut.”
The express slowed down, to about ten miles an hour. Willie jumped onto the steep embankment and allowed himself to roll down.
The daylight was going. But Willie knew where he was. He had a walk of three miles or so to a village and a hut, more a farmhouse, whose owner he knew very well. The monsoon was over, but now, as if out of spite, it began to rain. Those three miles took a long time. Still, it could have been worse. If courage had not come to him, and he hadn’t jumped off the train at that dangerous steep bend, he would have been taken many extra miles to where the express stopped: a day’s journey on foot, at least.
It was just before eight when he came to the village. There were no lights. People went to sleep early here; nights were long. The village street ran along the mud-and-wattle front wall of Shivdas’s high farmhouse. Willie shook the low door and called. Presently Shivdas called back, and soon, wearing almost nothing, a very dark and tall and gaunt man, he opened the low door and let Willie into the kitchen, which was at the front of the house, behind the mud-and-wattle street wall. The thatch was black and grainy from years of cooking smoke.
Shivdas said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Willie said, “There’s been an emergency. Bhoj Narayan has been arrested.”
Shivdas took the news calmly. He said, “Come, dry yourself. Some tea? Some rice?”
He called to someone in the next room, and there was movement there. Willie knew what that movement meant: Shivdas was asking his wife to give up their bed to the visitor. It was what Shivdas did on such occasions. The courtesy came instinctively to him. He and his wife then left the thatched main house and moved to the low, open, tile-covered rooms at the side of the courtyard at the back, where their children slept.
Less than an hour later, lying in Shivdas’s bed below the high, black, cool thatch, in a warm smell of old clothes and tobacco which was like the smell of the third-class railway compartment of just a couple of hours before, Willie thought, “We think, or they think, that Shivdas does what he does because he is a peasant revolutionary, someone created by the movement, someone new and very precious. But Shivdas does what he does because he is instinctively following old ideas, old ways, old courtesies. One day he will not give up his bed to me. He will not think he needs to. That will be the end of the old world and the end of the revolution.”
FIVE
Deeper in the Forest
HE GOT TO his base—it had been his and Bhoj Narayan’s, his commander—late the next afternoon. It was a half-tribal or quarter-tribal village deep in the forest and so far not touched by police action; it was a place where he might truly rest, if such rest was possible for him now.
He arrived at what
some people still called the hour of cow-dust, the hour when in the old days a cattle boy (hired for a few cents a day by the village) drove the village cattle home in a cloud of dust, and the golden light of early evening turned that sacred dust to soft, billowing gold. There were no cattle boys now; there were no landowners to hire them. The revolutionaries had put an end to that kind of feudal village life, though there were still people who needed to have their cattle looked after, and there were still little boys who pined to be hired for the long, idle day. But the golden light at this time of day was still considered special. It lit up the open forest all around, and for a few minutes made the white mud walls and the thatch of the village huts and the small scattered fields of mustard and peppers look well cared for and beautiful: like a village of an old fairy tale, restful and attractive to come upon, but then full of menace, with dwarves and giants and tall wild forest growth and men with axes and children being fattened in cages.
This village was for the time being under the control of the movement. It was one of a number of headquarters villages and was subject to something like a military occupation by the guerrillas. They were noticeable in their thin olive uniforms and peaked caps with a red star: trousers-people, as the tribals respectfully called them, and with guns.
Willie had a room in a commandeered long hut. He had a traditional four-poster string bed, and he had learned like a villager to store small objects between the rafters (of trimmed tree branches) and the low thatch. The floor, of beaten earth, was bound and made smooth with a mixture of mud and cow-dung. He had got used to it. The hut for some months had become a kind of home. It was where he returned after his expeditions; and it was an important addition to the list he carried in his head of places he had slept in, and was able to count (as was his habit) when he felt he needed to get hold of the thread of his life. But now the hut had also become a place where, without Bhoj Narayan, he was horribly alone. He was glad to have got there, but then, almost immediately, he had become restless.
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