He thought, “It was never going to be easy, what I am doing.”
THE ACHE of broken sleep was still in his bones, still in his head. But the actual sleepiness had gone. He went walking in the bazaar, the lights coming on around him, looking for the cheapest and simplest and safest cooked food he could find. He was not really hungry now, but he wished to practise whenever he could what he thought of as the new yoga of his day-to-day living, in which every act and need was to be worked out again, reduced to what was most basic. He was amazed to find how far he had come, how adaptable he was. A year ago or less there were, after the splendours and excesses of the colonial time, the deprivations and camp life, the siege conditions of Africa towards the end of the war. Just a few days before there was all the bustle and luxury of West Berlin. Just a few minutes before there was the comparative comfort and order of Joseph’s kitchen. And now he was here, in the dim and varied lights of the bazaar, the smoky flambeau, the hurricane lamp, the pressure lamp, looking with excitement for what he might subsist on, wishing to take his needs down and ever further down. Soon, he knew, when he found himself in forest or countryside, this bazaar would appear an impossible luxury. There would be other foods, other austerities: he would be ready for them when they came. He was already in his own mind a kind of ascetic, almost a seeker. He had never known anything like it—Africa in the bad days had been the opposite of this, had been suffering alone—and it made him lightheaded.
He spent a penny or so on a dish of spicy chickpeas. It had been simmering for hours, and would be safe. It was served to him in a leaf bowl, a bowl made of a dried leaf pinned together with pieces of twig. The spices burnt his tongue, but he ate with relish, surrendering to his new simplicity. He went back to the Riviera, and the warmth in his stomach soon returned him to his interrupted sleep.
The next day he moved to the Neo Anand Bhavan, and after the exaltation of his night at the Riviera there followed the emptiest and most tormenting days Willie had ever known, days of waiting in an almost empty room with a strong sewer smell for unknown people to come and take him on to his destiny. The walls were a strange mottled colour, as though they had absorbed all kinds of vile liquids; below the coconut mat dust was at least a quarter of an inch thick; and the ceiling bulb gave hardly any light. He had thought in the beginning that he should always be there, in the room, waiting for the person who was going to come for him. It was only later that he thought that this person would have time on his hands and would be prepared to wait. So he prowled about the town, and found himself going with many other people to the railway station, for the excitement of the trains, the crowds, the harsh calls of hawkers and the cries of wounded or beaten dogs.
One evening on the station platform he found a little swivel stand of very old American paperbacks, discarded stock, dirt seeming to have worked itself into the shiny covers, rather like the ancient electronic goods that on occasion turned up in certain traders’ shops in Africa, with the instruction leaflets yellow with age. He wanted nothing that would remind him of the world he had abjured. He rejected and rejected, and then at last he lighted on two books that seemed to meet his need. A book from the 1950s or 1960s about Harlem, The Cool World, a novel, told in the first person; and a book about the Incas of Peru, the Royal Commentaries, by a man partly of the Inca royal family. Willie could hardly believe his luck.
At the Neo Anand Bhavan they gave him a hurricane lantern to read by. He would have liked candles, for their old-fashioned romance, but they had no candles. And then, as before, when he had tried the mathematical books, he soon floundered. The Royal Commentaries required knowledge of a sort that Willie didn’t have; it very quickly became abstract. And The Cool World was simply too far away, too American, too New York, too full of allusions he couldn’t get.
Willie thought, “I have to understand now that, in this venture, books are a cheat. I have to depend on my own resources.”
It didn’t become easier for him at the Neo Anand Bhavan. He began then consciously to concentrate on the yoga of his hour-to-hour life, looking on each hour, each action, as challenging and important. No segment of time was to be wasted. Everything was to be part of his new discipline. And in this new discipline the idea of waiting on external events was to be banished.
He lived intensely; he became absorbed in himself. He found he had begun to deal with time.
And then one day the courier arrived. The courier was very young, almost a boy. He wore the local style of loincloth and long-tailed shirt.
He said to Willie, “I will come for you in seven days. I have to look for some of the others.”
Willie said, “What clothes should I wear?”
The courier didn’t appear to understand. He said, “What clothes do you have?” He might have been a college boy.
Willie spoke to him as though he was that. He said, “What would be best for me? Should I wear canvas shoes, or should I be barefoot?”
“Please don’t be barefoot. That will be asking for trouble. There are scorpions and all kinds of dangerous things on the ground. The local people wear ox-hide slippers.”
“What about food? You must tell me what to do.”
“Get some sattoo. It’s a kind of powdered roasted grain. You can buy it in the bazaar. It’s actually like sand when it’s dry. When you are hungry you mix it with a little water. Very little, just enough to soften it. It’s very tasty, and it lasts. It’s what people use when they travel. The other thing you might get is a local towel or shawl. Everyone here has a towel. It’s about four or five feet long, with tasselled ends, and about two feet wide. You wear it around the neck or over a shoulder. The material is very thin and fine. You can dry yourself with it after a bath, and it dries very quickly, in about twenty minutes. I will come for you in seven days. In the meantime I will report that I have found you.”
Willie went to the bazaar to buy sattoo. It wasn’t as easy as he thought. There were different kinds, made from different grains.
Willie, in his new mood, thought, “What ritual, what beauty.”
Seven days later the college boy came back for him. The college boy said, “Those other fellows made me waste a lot of time. They weren’t really interested. They were just talking. One of them was an only son. He had a bigger loyalty to his family. The other one just loved the good life.”
They went in the evening to the railway station, and there they took a passenger train. A passenger train was a slow train, stopping at all the halts. At every halt there was commotion and racket and pushing and shoving and grating voices raised in complaint or protest or just raised for the formality of the thing. At every halt there was dust and the smell of old tobacco and old cloth and old sweat. The schoolboy slept through most of it. Willie thought in the beginning, “I am going to have a shower at the end of this.” Then he thought that he wouldn’t: that wish for hour-to-hour comfort and cleanliness belonged to another kind of life, another way of experiencing. Better to let the dust and dirt and smells settle on him.
They travelled all night, but the passenger train had actually covered very little ground; and then in the bright light of morning the schoolboy left Willie, saying, “Someone will come for you here.”
Behind the screen doors and the thick walls the waiting room was dark. People, wrapped up from head to toe in blankets and dirty grey sheets, were sleeping on benches and the floor. At four o’clock that afternoon Willie’s second courier came, a tall, thin, dark man in a local loincloth of a gingham pattern, and they began walking.
After an hour Willie thought, “I no longer know where I am. I don’t think I will be able to pick my way back. I am in their hands now.”
They were now far from the railway town, far from the town. They were deep in the country, and it was getting dark. They came to a village. Even in the dark Willie could see the trimmed eaves of the thatched roof of the important family of the village. The village was a huddle of houses and huts, back to back and side to side, with narrow angular lanes. T
hey walked past all the good houses and stopped at the edge, at an open thatched hut. The owner was an outcast, and very dark. One of the cricket people Joseph had talked about, created by centuries of slavery and abuse and bad food. Willie did not think him especially friendly. The thatch of his hut was rough, untrimmed. The hut was about ten feet by ten feet. Half of it was living space and washing-up space; the other half, with a kind of loft, was sleeping space, for calves and hens as well as people.
Willie thought, “It’s pure nature now. Everything I have to do I will do in the bush.”
Later they ate a kind of rice gruel, thick and salty.
Willie thought, “They’ve been living like this for centuries. I have been practising my yoga, so to speak, for a few days, and have become obsessed by it. They have been practising a profounder kind of yoga, every day, every meal. That yoga is their life. And of course there would be days when there would be nothing at all to eat, not even this gruel. Please, let me be granted the strength to bear what I am seeing.”
And for the first time in his life Willie that evening fell asleep in his dirt. He and his guide rested all the next day in the hut while the owner went out to do his work. The next afternoon they began to walk again. They halted at night in another village, and spent the night again in a hut with a calf and hens. They ate rice flakes. There was no tea, no coffee, no hot drink. The water they drank was dirty, from a muddy brook.
Two days later they had left fields and villages behind and were in a teak forest. They came by moonlight that evening to a clearing in the forest. There were low olive-coloured plastic tents around a cleared area. There were no lights, no fires. In the moonlight shadows were black and sharp.
Willie’s guide said, “No talking. No questions.”
They ate quite well that evening, groundnut, rice flakes, and wild meat. In the morning Willie considered his companions. They were not young. They were city people, people who would have had each man his own reason for dropping out of the workaday world and joining the guerrillas.
During the day Willie thought, “Kandapalli preached the Mass Line. Kandapalli wished the villagers and the poor to fight their own battles. I am not among the poor and the villagers in this camp. There has been some mistake. I have fallen among the wrong people. I have come to the wrong revolution. I don’t like these faces. And yet I have to be with them. I have to get a message out to Sarojini or to Joseph. But I don’t know how. I am completely in the hands of these people.”
Two evenings later a rough man in military uniform came to him and said, “Tonight, man from Africa, you will do sentry duty.”
That night Willie cried, tears of rage, tears of fear, and in the dawn the cry of the peacock, after it had drunk from its forest pool, filled him with grief for the whole world.
THREE
The Street of the Tanners
THERE WERE ABOUT forty or fifty people in the camp. Word went around, spread from newcomer to newcomer, that there were ten, even twenty, camps like this one in the liberated areas, the areas under the control of the guerrillas; and this gave a general confidence, even brought about a kind of swagger in the recruits, especially after olive uniforms were handed out. This happened on the fourth day. Somewhere, Willie thought, thinking back to what he had heard of the guerrillas in his part of Africa, some cloth-seller had been made to pay his dues to the movement in this cheap, lightweight olive cloth; and some village tailor had been asked to do some rough sewing. A peaked cloth cap came with the uniform; just above the visor was a star in red satin. The uniform and the cap spoke of drama, coming suddenly to forty or fifty lives; it also spoke reassuringly of organisation; and it gave everyone a new, easy, sheltering identity.
It was a training camp. The sentry, not speaking, making no sound, woke them up one by one while it was still dark. The rule of the camp was that there was to be no sound and no light at night. Afterwards there came the calls of the noisy peacocks and other forest birds, fully a mile off, one bird in particular giving strident, desperate-sounding calls of alarm when it thought that some predator was getting too close to its eggs. At about six there was the roll call, and then for three hours they jogged and did physical exercises and sometimes practised crawling on the ground with a gun in their hands. For breakfast they had peanuts and rice flakes. And then they were lectured on guerrilla tactics. They were to make no sound when they were in the forest; they were to communicate by making bird calls, and they spent much time practising these bird calls. They were all very serious; no one laughed when the bird whistles went wrong. After lunch—which could mean deer or frogs or goat: this was not a vegetarian movement—they rested until mid-afternoon; and then they drilled and exercised for an hour and a half. The worst time then followed: the long evening, eleven hours long, without lights or proper speech, everyone talking only in whispers.
Willie thought, “I have never known such boredom. Ever since I have come to India I have known these terrible nights of boredom. I suppose it is a kind of training, a kind of asceticism, but for what I am not sure. I must look upon it as another chamber of experience. I must give no sign to these people that I am not absolutely with them.”
When he was staying at the Neo Anand Bhavan he had bought some pre-stamped air-letter sheets. He began one hot afternoon in his oppressive plastic tent to write a letter to Sarojini. It was the only time he could write.
Dear Sarojini, I think something terrible has happened. I am not with the people we talked about. I don’t know how it’s happened, but I believe I am with Kandapalli’s enemies.
He thought that was too open. He crossed out Kandapalli’s name, and then decided that it was too dangerous for him to write to Sarojini. He put the letter aside, in the kind of canvas backpack he had been given, and looked out through the flap at the white, melancholy light of the forest clearing and the exercise ground.
He thought, “This light denies everything. It denies beauty. It denies human possibility. Africa was gentler, as Joseph suggested. Perhaps I have been too long away. But I mustn’t think too much along those lines. The cause we talked about in Berlin is still good and true. That I know.”
The rule in the camp, enunciated by the leader—a man of about forty, who looked like a businessman or civil servant, and had possibly been a member of the cadets at his school—the rule was that the recruits should not ask too many questions of their fellows. They should simply accept them as wearers of the red star. And Willie lost himself in conjecture about the people around him. They were all people in their late thirties or early forties, Willie’s age, and he wondered what weakness or failure had caused them in mid-life to leave the outer world and to enter this strange chamber. He had been away from India too long. He couldn’t assess the backgrounds of the people around him. He could only try to read the faces and the physiques: the too-full, sensual mouth in some speaking of some kind of sexual perversion, the hard mean eyes in others, the bruised-seeming eyes of yet others that spoke of hard or abused childhoods and tormented adult lives. That was as far as he could read. Among these people seeking in various ways to revenge themselves on the world, he was among strangers.
On the tenth or eleventh night there was a great disturbance in the camp. The sentry panicked and began to shout, and all the camp was filled with alarm.
Somebody shouted, “The Greyhounds!”
That was the name of the special anti-guerrilla force within the police. They used guerrilla tactics: they were said to specialise in speed, secrecy, and surprise, the three S’s, and they attacked first. This was their well-publicised reputation, and a number of terrified recruits ran out from their plastic tents and made for the forest.
It was a false alarm. Some animal had stumbled into the camp and frightened the sentry.
Gradually then people were called back, shame-faced, many of them only in their underclothes, and angry, full of a new rage.
Willie thought, “Until tonight they thought they were the only ones with guns and training and discipl
ine, the only ones with a programme. It made them brave. Now they have an idea of an enemy, and they are not so brave. They are only meaner. They will be very nasty tomorrow. I will have to be careful with them.”
Nothing was said by the leader that night. He was concerned in his businessman’s or bureaucrat’s way only to restore order. At dawn the routine of the camp was as before. It was only after breakfast (peanuts, rice flakes, the usual), and when the “military theory” class was to begin, that the leader spoke to the camp; and then he spoke not as a man wishing to enforce discipline, but as a man fearful of a mass desertion, fearful of violence and the break-up of his camp. He knew his audience. At the beginning of his talk they were restive, like people who had been found out and in childlike pique had returned to their old bruised identities, ready to forgo the shelter and comfort of their olive uniforms and the red satin stars on their caps, which only a few days before had appeared to make a new life so easy for them. They were waiting for rebuke, foreheads furrowed, eyes narrow and mean, lips pursed, cheeks puffed out: middle-aged men full of childhood pique but capable of adult rage. They were not going to put up with rebuke. When it became clear that the leader had no intention of mocking them they gradually calmed down.
Willie thought, “Kandapalli was right. If I was concerned with making a revolution for the defeated and the insulted, if like Kandapalli I could cry easily at the thought of people’s unrevenged sorrows over the centuries, these are not the men I would want with me. I would go to the poor themselves.”
The leader said, “The sentry made a mistake last night and gave us all a big fright. I don’t think the sentry should be blamed. He is not used to the forest and wild animals, and too much was placed anyway on the shoulders of one man. From tonight we will have two sentries. But what happened last night shows how important it is for us at all times to be on our guard. We must always imagine that the enemy is observing us, and we must expect him at every turn of every road. Something is always to be learned from a misadventure, and as a result of last night we will develop our exercises. We will attempt over the next few days to get everyone familiar with certain defensive procedures. These procedures should become second nature to us all, at any time of day or night, and that will help in the next emergency.”