Two weeks after Sarojini’s visit he was transferred to the hospital ward. He received books from her and began to read again. He was dazzled by everything he read. Everything seemed miraculous. Every writer seemed a prodigy. Something like this used to happen to him when very long ago, in another life, as it now seemed, he had tried to write stories and was sometimes stuck, his mind clogged. Those days usually occurred when he was deep in a story. He would wonder how anyone ever had the courage to write a sentence. He might even look at an aspirin bottle or a cough syrup bottle and marvel at the confidence of the man who had written the directions and warnings. In some such way now a deep regard came to him for everyone who could put words together, and he was transported by everything he read. The experience was glorious, and he would think that it was probably worth coming to jail just for this, this heightening of intellectual pleasure, this opening up of something in life he knew little of.
Something unusual happened five months or so after he had gone to the hospital ward.
The superintendent was doing his Monday morning round. Willie felt the superintendent’s eyes on him and the first thought that came to him was that his time in the hospital ward was coming to an end. Sure enough, later that day a message came to Willie from the superintendent, relayed down the chain of command.
The next day Willie went to the superintendent’s dark-panelled office with the diamond pattern in iron over the air vent.
The superintendent said, “You are walking wounded, I see.”
Willie made a pleading gesture, asking for understanding.
“I will tell you why I called you. I’ve explained to you the privileged position you enjoy in the jail and which is open to you at any moment to take advantage of. We operate under the same rules as in the British time. You gave an undertaking at the time of your surrender that you had done nothing that could be thought of as a heinous crime under Section 302. It was part of the package. All of you gave that undertaking. So we have the strange situation where hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed by your movement, but we have not been able to find a single one of you who did anything. In all your statements it was always someone else who killed or pulled the trigger. Suppose now that there is someone in the jail who wishes to change that statement. Someone who is actually willing to say that X or Y or Z had actually done a particular killing.”
Willie said, “Is there such a person?”
The superintendent said, “There may be. In a jail everybody is at war. I told you that.”
HE WAS QUITE lucid in the superintendent’s office. But later in his hospital bed his mind clouded and he was swamped by darkness. Cold fluids seemed to flow through his body. Something like real illness seemed to chill him. And yet all the time with the steadier part of his mind he was also thinking, as though he was filing away something for future use, “This is beautifully done. If you have to betray and damage someone, this is the way to do it. When it is least expected, and with no calling card.”
A Gandhi-capped prisoner brought his dinner from the jail kitchen. It was what it always was. A plastic bowl of lentil soup, thickened perhaps with flour (you couldn’t tell until you tasted it). And six pieces of flat bread, cooling and sweating fast.
When he woke up in the night, he thought, in the desolation of the hospital ward, “Yesterday I was happy.”
He had trained himself to stay away from the vegetable patches and the orchard where the politicals worked. But the next morning when he went to have a look he saw the man whom he feared to see: Einstein. His mind had fastened on him as the betrayer, and this sighting of him for the first time in the jail grounds was like a confirmation. Einstein, intuitively disliked at first sight (and the memory of that first dislike was always with Willie), intuitively distrusted, then a companion in bad times, and now distrusted again. Willie knew that Einstein would have felt about him what he had felt about Einstein. He had grown to believe, especially in those last years in the forest, that there was a neat reciprocity in relationships. If you liked a man you would invariably get on with him; if you didn’t feel easy with him he almost certainly felt the same way about you. In the jail Einstein and many of the others would have gone back to their hate, each man to his own, as to some secret treasure, something which in a time of uncertainty they could gaze on and be revivified. (Willie remembered the rhetorical and ignorant and boastful revolutionary they had met in the forest, a remnant of a long-defeated rebellion, who had been tramping through the villages for thirty years with his simple philosophy of murder, incapable now of any higher thought, and yet easily made timid.) It didn’t take much to see how in the jail Einstein, daily cherishing the private treasure of his hate, and for no other reason, perhaps for no reward, would find immense satisfaction in this betrayal of Willie.
After that sighting of Einstein Willie went back to his hospital bed. He asked the warder for a sheet of writing paper and wrote to Sarojini.
Two weeks later she came to see him. When he told her what had happened she said, “This is serious.”
And immediately he could see, in spite of her ashram life and white cotton sari, her fixer’s mind at work. To agitate on behalf of political prisoners all over the world had been part of her political work. In the small room in the jail he could see her mind ranging fast over the possibilities.
She said, “Who published your book in London? The book of stories.”
He told her. It seemed like another life now.
“A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?”
“The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London.”
“Clearly those riots had an effect on you?” She was like a lawyer.
“I don’t know.”
“Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you associated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that.”
“There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don’t suppose that’s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That’s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book.”
“Thirty years on he might be famous.”
He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarrassed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.
ROGER, THE LAWYER, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years there he had often looked at it. As the Latin poet says, Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way, books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you. Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger’s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.
It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.
“Still walking wounded,” the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, “You never told us you were a writer.”
Willie said, “It was a long time ago.”
“That’s just it,” the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. “It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing.”
And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.
Six months later,
under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.
EIGHT
The London Beanstalk
THE PLANE THAT took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter.
Willie felt old stirrings, the beginning of old grief. But then he thought, “I have been there. I have given part of my life and I have nothing to show for it. I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible.”
Roger was at the barrier outside, camouflaged among the taxi-drivers with name cards and the large, buzzing family groups waiting for the travellers with heavy baggage. In spite of himself Willie was looking for a man thirty years younger, and Roger was not immediately recognisable. At first sight he was like a man in disguise.
Willie apologised for making him wait.
Roger said, “I have learned to possess my soul in patience. The board told me that you had landed, and then it told me that you were most probably in the baggage hall.”
The voice and the tone were familiar. They recreated the vanished man, the man Willie remembered, who was now like someone hidden within the person before him. The effect was disturbing.
Later, when Willie’s small suitcase was in the boot of Roger’s car, and parking charges had been settled at the machine, Roger said, “It’s like being at the theatre. But in real life it’s unnerving. The second act ends, and after the interval the man comes out with a powdered wig and a creased face. You see him as old. Old age can often look like a moral infirmity, and in real life to see someone suddenly old is like seeing a moral infirmity made suddenly clear. And then you understand that the other man is looking at you in the same way. Do you know anyone here? Have you kept in touch?”
“I used to know a girl at the Debenhams perfume counter. Hardly knew her, really. She was the friend of a friend, and all the time she was engaged to somebody else. The whole thing is too embarrassing to think about now. Do you think she would remember, after twenty-eight years?”
Roger said, “She would remember. When she counts her lovers—and she would do that quite often—she would count you in.”
“How terrible. What do you think would have happened to her?”
“Fat. Faithless. Betrayed. Complaining about the wicked world. Vain. Talking too much. Commoner than ever. Women are more physical and more shallow than one imagines.”
Willie said, “Will I have to be here now forever and ever?”
“It was part of the deal.”
“What will happen to me? How will I pass the time?”
“Don’t think about it now. Just let it happen. Let it begin. Let it flow over you.”
“When I went to Africa I remember that on the first day I looked out of the bathroom window and saw everything outside through a rusty screen. I never wanted to stay. I thought that something was going to happen, that I would never unpack. Yet I stayed for eighteen years. And it was like that when I joined the guerrillas. The first night in the teak forest. It was too unreal. I wasn’t going to stay. Something was going to happen and I was going to be liberated. But nothing happened, and I stayed seven years. We were always on the move in the forest. One day in a village I met a man, a revolutionary, who said he had been in the forest for thirty years. He was probably exaggerating, but he had been there a very long time. He was someone from the previous revolution. That revolution had died long before, but he had carried on. It had become a way of life for him, hiding, pretending to be a villager. Like an ascetic in his hermitage in the forest in an old story. Or like Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. The man was mad. His mind had stopped, like a dead clock, and he was still living with the ideas that were in his head when the clock stopped, showing the same time forever. Those ideas were very sharp, and when he talked of them he was like a sane man. There were people like that in the jail. I could always step back from myself, and consider my situation. But there were moments when I felt myself changing. The whole thing was so strange, such a string of unreal episodes, I feel in time I would have gone mad like the others. The brain is so delicate, and man can adapt to so many situations. That’s how it’s been for me. Has it been like that for you too? At least in some ways?”
Roger said, “I would like to say that it’s the same for all of us. But my life these last thirty years hasn’t been like that. I have always felt myself in the real world. That may be because I have always felt that life had dealt me a good hand. It sounds smug, but there have been no surprises.”
Willie said, “My life has been a series of surprises. Unlike you, I had no control over things. I thought I had. My father and all the people around him thought they had. But what looked like decisions were not decisions really. For me it was a form of drift, because I didn’t see what else there was for me to do. I thought I wanted to go to Africa. I thought that something would happen and I would be shown the true way, the way meant for me alone. But as soon as I got on the ship I was frightened. And you—did you marry Perdita?”
“I couldn’t tell you why. I suppose my sexual energy is low. There were six or seven people I might have married, and it would have always ended as it did with Perdita. It was a piece of good fortune for me that quite soon after our marriage she fell into a good and solid relationship with a friend of mine. This friend had a very big London house. It was something he had inherited, but that big London house excited Perdita. I was actually disappointed in her—her delight in the man’s big house. But most people in this country have a streak of commonness. The aristocrats love their titles. The rich count their money all the time, and are always calculating whether the other man has less or more. The romantic middle-class idea in the old days was that the true aristocrats, and not the jumped-up middle class, never truly knew who they were. Not so. The aristocrats I have got to know always know who they are. They can be awfully common, those aristocrats. One man I know loves appearing among his dinner guests in a bathrobe, dishing out the drinks—and then going off to dress, after having humiliated all of us who were invited to his grand house. ‘What dressing up, my dear,’ he said to somebody afterwards, retailing the incident. ‘How grand we all were!’ The ‘we,’ of course, was ironical. He meant ‘they,’ the guests he had made to come all dressed up. I was one of the guests, and I was the somebody he told the story to later. So I suppose Perdita’s commonness is not so extraordinary. But I expected better of someone who had married me.”
Willie was recognising London names from the direction boards. But they were driving along a new highway.
Roger said, “All this used to be part of your beat. Until they drove this road through it. I suppose that the common people are the only ones who are not common in the way I mean. Shallow and self-regarding and acting up to some idea of who they are. Anyway, there was Perdita having this relationship with this bounder with the big London house, everything satisfactory to all parties, the bounder having somebody’s wife as his mistress, Perdita intimate with a big London house and feeling quite adult. Then Perdita became pregnant. It was quite late for her, perhaps too late. The lover was alarmed. His love didn’t extend that far—looking after a child forever and ever. So Perdita turned to me for support. I didn’t like seeing her so w
retched. I have a soft spot for her, you see. But I didn’t understand the situation. I misread Perdita’s passion, and said more or less that I was willing to surrender all rights, so to speak. Willing to let her go. I thought it was what she wanted to hear. But it made her hysterical, that two men should care so little for her. We had many a tearful session. For two or three weeks I dreaded going home. And then I said that the child was possibly mine and I was happy that a child was on the way. None of this was true, of course.
“I dreaded the arrival of the child. For some time I lived with the idea that I would leave Perdita, find some studio flat somewhere. In my imagination that studio flat became cosier and cosier and more and more removed from everything. It was immensely comforting. And then something happened. Perdita had a miscarriage. That was a mess. Just as I had been going into a shell, dreaming of my cosy little studio flat, so now she retreated into herself. She had a good long wallow. It was worse than before. There were days when I actually thought of not going home but of going to some hotel. She banned the lover, the bounder, my old legal friend. I began to think after some time that she was enjoying her situation, and I lived with her during this time as I would have lived with someone with a broken leg or arm, something dramatic to behold but not life-threatening.