Magic Seeds

by V. S. Naipaul

  Dear Willie, I left the Charlottenburg flat long ago, and your letter was passed on from one address to another and finally here. Berliners are very good about that sort of thing. I am sorry you have had so long to wait for a reply. It must have been awful for you. And all the time I was so close to you, less than a day away. But please don’t think I will come to see you if you don’t want it. In London when I went to see you that time at the college you didn’t like it too much. I remember that. And all I wanted was to do good. It is my curse. The business went so wrong so quickly for you. What can I say? I will never forgive myself. That is no consolation for you, I know. You were sent to the wrong people, and as it turned out the other lot were not going to be much better. You were going to be snookered either way.

  I came here because I needed a rest from Berlin, and I thought I should come and be with our father, who is near the end. I have told you this before, but I think now he was a finer man than any of us gave him credit for. Perhaps in the end one way of life is as good as any other, but that probably is what defeated people have to tell themselves. I am not too happy with what I have done, though everything was always done with the best of intentions. It is awful to say, but I believe I have sent many people to their doom in many countries. I know now that in the last few years the intelligence people of various countries followed us wherever we went. People trusted us because of what we had done, and we let nobody down. But then in these last few years the people we persuaded to let us make films about them were later picked up one by one. I can give you a list of the countries. It wasn’t always like that, and Wolf had nothing to do with it. He is as much of a dupe as the rest of us.

  I don’t know how I can live with this idea. I was acting for the best, but when the chips were down people would say I was acting for the worst. Perhaps the best thing now would be for someone to bump me off in revenge.

  I have nothing more to say just now. You wouldn’t believe from what I have written that my heart is breaking. If I read this letter over I will scrap it and never start writing another. So I will send it as it is. Please let me know whether you want me to come and see you. A little money always comes in handy in jail. Please remember that.

  It took him some time to digest all that was in the letter. He had felt at first that the letter, childish in parts, was emotionally false. But after some time, considering that when she wrote the letter she would have been surrounded by memories of childhood despair (which would have been like his own), he felt that everything was true. The news of betrayals did not surprise him; but that might have been because in these past few years he had got used to the fluidity, so to speak, of human personality as it adapted to new circumstances. What was upsetting was that for so long she (who had misled him) had been so near and in such a penitent mood. When the world had become phantasmagoric for him, during those desolate marches and bivouacs in the forest, fruitless and unending, he might at any moment have reached out a hand to her, so to speak, and been put in touch again with reality.

  He waited for some days before writing. He wanted to clarify his thoughts and to find the right words. (There was no need for rush. Every everyday thing had to be stretched out now: a new form of yoga.) And this time her reply came in ten days.

  Dear Willie, I was expecting some word of rebuke from you. There was none. You are a saint. Perhaps after all you are our father’s son …

  And all around him was the regimented, protected life of the jail: nine outdoor hours, fifteen hours of confinement.

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT: that, for visitors, was on the inside of the front wall, at the end of the lane leading to the double main gate. For the prisoners there were smaller signs in sloping, racy lettering. Truth always wins. Anger is a man’s greatest enemy. To do good is the greatest religion. Work is worship. Nonviolence is the greatest of all religions. The time would come when he would cease to see the signs. But in the beginning, out of some kind of student’s impishness, surviving in him though he was now not far off fifty, Willie thought he should write on a wall: A stitch in time saves nine. He never attempted it. Punishments were severe. But in his mind’s eye he saw the sign sitting casually among the other pieties, and it amused him for weeks.

  WILLIE SHARED A CELL with seven or eight other prisoners. The number varied: some people came and went. The cell was quite big, thirty feet by ten or twelve feet, and for some prisoners it was bigger than anything they had known outside.

  One or two prisoners had grown up in factory slums in a city, with brothers and sisters and parents all in one room. The standard room in those places was a cube, ten feet in all directions, with a loft about seven feet up that provided extra sleeping space (especially useful for night workers, who could sleep through the morning or afternoon while daytime family life went on below them). The man who told Willie this did so in a straightforward way at first, speaking of things that to him were quite straightforward, but when he saw that he was shocking Willie he began to swagger a little and exaggerate. In the end (Willie asked a lot of questions) the man had to admit, unwillingly, since it spoiled his story, that the one-room family life he was describing was possible only because so many things were done outside the room, in the wide corridor and in the yard. For the rest, the man said, it was like getting on a crowded bus. You didn’t think you could get on, but somehow you did; once you were in, you didn’t think you could last, but just a minute or two later, with the movement of the bus, everybody had shaken down and after a while everyone was quite comfortable. It was a little bit like jail, the man said. You didn’t think you could do it, but then you found it wasn’t so bad after all. A good roof, a ceiling fan in the really hot weather, a good solid concrete floor, regular food, a splash below the standpipe in the yard every morning, and even a little television, if you didn’t mind standing up with the others to watch it.

  This man’s pleasure in the jail routine helped Willie. And even when, in the way of jails, the man had moved on, Willie remembered what he had said about “shaking down” and added it to his yoga.

  The people in the cell gradually changed until they were all like Willie, men of the movement who had surrendered. Their treatment then was much better, and the jail superintendent, as if explaining this, said one day, when he was doing his weekly round, with all his deferential officials, that they were now regarded as “politicals.” The British, the superintendent said, had established this category of prisoner to deal with Gandhi and Nehru and the other nationalists who broke the law but couldn’t be treated like other criminals.

  Willie was excited by the prospect of favoured treatment. But his excitement didn’t last long. The people in the political cells (there was another) were free, always within the jail routine, to organise their activities. And very quickly Willie saw that this favoured treatment had taken him back to what he had walked away from. The routine the politicals established was very much like the routine of the first camp in the teak forest, but without guns and military training. At five thirty they were awakened. At six they assembled outside, and then for two and a half hours they worked on the jail’s vegetable plots and orchard. At nine they came back and had breakfast. After that they read the local regional newspapers (provided by the jail) and discussed the news. But the serious intellectual work of the morning was studying the texts of Mao and Lenin. This study, half pious, half mendacious, with people saying what they felt they had to say about the peasantry and the proletariat and the revolution, was sterile to Willie, always a waste of education and mind, and soon, in spite of the favoured treatment and even respect it secured in the jail, it became unbearable. He felt that what remained of his mind would rot away if for three or four hours a day he had to take part in these discussions. And even after the afternoon games and exercise, volleyball, jogging, which was meant to tire them out so that they could sleep, there were evening political discussions, shallow and lying and repetitive, with nothing new ever said, in the cell after lock-up time at six thirty.

 
Willie thought, “I will not last. I will not shake down, as that man said people shook down in the crowded bus when the bus began to move. In the bus you can shake down because you are all body. You are not asked to use mind. Here you have to use mind or half-mind in a terrible, corrupting way. Even sleep is poisoned, because you know what you are going to wake up to. One terrible day follows another. It is extraordinary to think that people do this to themselves.”

  One Monday, about two months later, when the superintendent was doing his round with his retinue of lesser jail officials, Willie broke out of the line of standing prisoners. He said to the superintendent, “Sir, I would like to see you in your office, if that is possible.” The lower jail people, warder and head warder and chief head warder, were all for beating Willie back with their long staffs, but Willie’s civility and educated voice and his calling the superintendent sir acted like protection.

  The superintendent said to the jailer, “Bring him to my office after the round.”

  The hierarchy of the jail! It was like the army, it was like a business organisation, it was a little bit like the hierarchy of the movement. The foot-soldiers were the warder and head warder and chief head warder (though “warder” sounded such a good, polite word). The officers were the sub-jailer and the jailer (in spite of the brutal, key-jangling associations of the word, more suited, Willie always thought, to the lower men who padded about outside the cells). Above the sub-jailer and jailer was the deputy superintendent of jails and, at the very top, the superintendent of jails. When a prisoner came to the jail, he might know nothing about the hierarchy that now ruled his life, might not be able to read the uniforms, but soon his reaction to uniforms and titles was instinctive.

  The superintendent’s office was panelled in some dark brown wood that had possibly been varnished. At the top of the wall a metal grille with a flat diamond pattern provided an air vent. On one panelled wall was a very large plan of the jail: the compounds, the cells, the assembly grounds, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the two perimeter walls, with every important exit marked with a thick red X.

  On the superintendent’s shoulders were the shining metal initials of the state prison service.

  Willie said, “I asked to see you, sir, because I wish to be moved from the cell where I am.”

  The superintendent said, “But it’s the best cell in the jail. A nice, big space. A lot of open-air activity. And you have the most educated people there. Discussions and so on.”

  Willie said, “I can’t stand it. I have had eight years of that sort of thing. I want to be with my own thoughts. Please put me among the ordinary criminals.”

  “This is most unusual. It’s very rough in the other cells. We are trying to treat you here as the British treated the mahatma and Nehru and the others.”

  “I know. But please move me.”

  “It will not be easy for you. You are an educated man.”

  “Let me try.”

  “All right. But let me do it in two weeks or so. Let people forget that you came to see me. I don’t want them to believe that you asked to be moved. They might feel insulted, or they might think you were an informer, and they might make trouble for you in various ways. In a jail everybody is at war. You must remember that.”

  Three weeks later Willie was moved to a cell in the other part of the jail. It was terrible. The cell was a long concrete room seemingly without furniture. All the way down the middle was a clear passageway about six feet wide. On either side of this passageway were the prisoners’ floor spaces. Willie’s strip of floor was about three feet wide, and he had a jail rug (in a bold blue pattern) on his strip of floor. That was all. No table, no cupboard: prisoners here kept such possessions as they had at the head of their floor space. Space was tight; one rug touched the other. The prisoners, sleeping or waking, kept their heads against the wall and their feet pointing towards the passageway. Each rug had a different pattern and colour; this helped every man to know his space (and was also useful to the warders).

  Willie thought, “I can’t go and ask the superintendent to move me back to the politicals. And when I think about it, I am not sure that I want to go back. They have that lovely vegetable garden and fruit orchard to work in. But all that discussion of the newspapers in the morning, which is no discussion at all, and all that study of Mao and Lenin in the evening is too big a price. Even in Africa among the settlers there was nothing quite so bad. Perhaps if I were a stronger man I could do it all and not be affected. But I am not strong in that way.”

  That first evening, as he was walking in the central open area between the jail rugs and the bed spaces, a very small man sprang up crying from one of the rugs and ran to Willie’s feet and held them. He was about four feet nine or ten inches, from Bangladesh, an illegal immigrant; whenever after each jail sentence he was taken to the border the Bangladeshis pushed him back, and he had some months of wandering until some new Indian jail claimed him. The sudden crying and leaping up and running to grasp the knees of some new official or visitor was one of his turns, something he did like a trained animal: his whole life was reduced to that.

  A letter came from Sarojini.

  Dear Willie, Our father is dead. He was cremated yesterday. I did not think to trouble you with this news, because I did not think you wanted to be troubled. Anyway, this is my news for you. I have decided to take over our father’s ashram. My thoughts have been running in that direction for some time, as I think you know. I have no religious wisdom, and I will not be able to offer people anything of what our father offered them. I think what I will do is to turn the ashram into a place of quiet and meditation, something with a Buddhist slant, which I know a little about, from Wolf. How strange it is that I, who had so little use for this kind of place all my life, should now do this. But life does this to people sometimes. Let me come and see you. I will explain things more fully face to face …

  He got a sheet of ruled paper from the warder and, lying on his rug and twisting his body a little over his neighbour’s space so that he could write on the low window sill of the cell, he wrote:

  Dear Sarojini, You run from one extreme to the other. The idea of the ashram is an idea of death in life, and it goes against everything you have believed. What we discussed in Berlin remains true. I am grateful to you for making me face myself and what I come from. I consider that a gift of life. I am surrounded here by a kind of distress I don’t know how to deal with, but the ashram is not the way. Nor was that foolish war which I went to fight. That war was not yours or mine and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression, but we were exploiting them all the time. Our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves. That was terrible to me, and it continues even here, where the talkers have favoured treatment and the poor are treated as the poor always are. They are mostly village people and they are undersized and thin. The most important thing about them is their small size. It is hard to associate them with the bigger crimes and the crimes of passion for which some of them are being punished. Abduction, kidnapping. I suppose if you were a villager you would see them as criminal and dangerous, but if you see them from a distance, as I still see them, although I am close to them night and day, you would be moved by the workings of the human soul, so complete within those frail bodies. Those wild and hungry eyes haunt me. They seem to me to carry a distillation of the country’s unhappiness. I don’t think there is any one single simple action which can help. You can’t take a gun and kill that unhappiness. All you can do is to kill people.

  SAROJINI CAME TO see him. She wore a white sari—white the colour of grief—and of course she didn’t have to wait with the others who had come to see prisoners in Willie’s cell. Her manner, her speech, and her dress won her immediate regard, and she did not squat in the hot sun—in a low subdued queue, two persons wide—with the other visitors, under the gaze of the warders with their heavy staffs. She sat in a room in the
front of the jail and Willie was called to see her. He liked her sari, and her general style, just as much as he had liked the jeans and chunky pullovers she had worn in Berlin.

  She was enraged about the country people waiting in line in the sun to see their relations.

  He said, “They don’t complain. They are happy to be in the queue. Some people make long journeys and wait all night and then in the morning they are turned away. Because they can’t tip the warders, or because they didn’t know they had to tip the warders. Money makes everything easy in the jail. The warders have to make a living, too, you know.”

  “You are trying to shock me. But I expected that. It tells me you are in good spirits.”

  “What we can really try to do is to get me in the hospital. There are about sixteen or twenty beds there. It’s a big, airy room, quite bare, but one isn’t looking for interior decoration in a jail. If we can slip the warders thirty or forty rupees a day, then my time in the jail becomes pure pleasure. I get an iron bed with a mattress, which is better than a rug on the floor, and all my meals are brought from the kitchen straight to me. Breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. Like a hotel.”

  “What about the sick people?”

  “They are where they belong, in the cells. What did you expect?”

  She said, quite seriously, “If I did it, would you go?”

  “I might. I am getting tired of the cell. I also would like to get something to read. The other people can discuss Lenin and Mao until the cows come home. But the only thing they like you to read in the common cells is a religious book.”

  “You’ll be a mental wreck by the time you leave.”

  “I think you are right. I am coming to the end of my mental resources. Once in Africa I had arranged to meet someone in the town on the coast. At a café or something. For various reasons I was terribly late. More than an hour. Yet when I went to the café the man was there, calmly waiting. He was a Portuguese. I apologised. He said, ‘There is no need. I have a well-stocked mind.’ I thought that was very grand. Probably he had heard it from somebody else, but I made it my ideal. After that, whenever I was in a doctor’s waiting room, say, or a hospital outpatients department, I never ran to the dingy magazines to kill time. I examined my well-stocked mind. I’ve been doing a lot of that in my cell. But my mind is letting me down now. I am coming to the end of what it has. I’ve thought of our parents and my childhood. Actually, there’s a lot there. I’ve thought of London. I’ve thought of Africa. I’ve thought of Berlin. Very important. I’ve thought of my years in the movement. If I were a religious man I would say that I was putting my spiritual life in order. Counting the beds I slept in.”