V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Willie said, “At least no one will come looking for us here.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “They are testing us. They wish to see whether we will break. Do you think you can stand it?”

Willie said, “It is possible to stand anything. We are tougher than we think. The people who live here have to stand it.”

The house in which the room had been rented for them was a small low house with a red-tile roof in a street of small low houses. There was an open gutter outside, and the walls of the rented room (shown them by one of the cricket people Joseph had talked about) had the same mottled multi-coloured quality as the walls of the Neo Anand Bhavan, as though all kinds of liquid impurities had worked their way up like a special kind of toxic damp.

Willie thought, “I must do something to fight this smell. I must try to overcome it mentally.”

But he couldn’t. And then, as he had done at various points in his recent journey (and just as sometimes in the past, feeling lost in Africa, unable to pick his way back to safety or to what he would be easy with, and with no one to confess his anxiety to, he had taken to counting the different beds he had slept in since he was born, to keep track of things), so now in the street of the tanners he began re-living the stages of his descent in the past year. From the desolation and real scarcities of a broken-down estate house in an abandoned Portuguese colony in Africa; to the flat in Charlottenburg in Berlin which at first had seemed to him a place looted and bare and unkempt and cold, speaking of postwar neglect, and full of earlier ghosts he could scarcely imagine; to the airport town in India, to the Riviera Hotel, to the Neo Anand Bhavan, to the guerrilla camp in the teak forest, and now this shock of the tanneries in a small town he didn’t know and wouldn’t be able to find on a map: separate chambers of experience and sensibility, each one a violation with which he in the end would live as though it was a complete world.

It was in this great stench of the street of the tanners that that evening he and Bhoj Narayan became close. As though it had needed that particular calamity (as it appeared) to bring them together. They went out walking, away from the smoky flambeaux of the tanneries, to the dim fluorescent lights of what to Willie now seemed the purer town, the bazaar (its flies now asleep) and the area around the railway station.

Willie said, “They’ve given us one hundred and fifty rupees for fourteen days. That’s ten rupees a day. In Berlin you wouldn’t be able to buy a cup of coffee with that. Do you think they expect us to spend our own money?”

Bhoj Narayan said, with a touch of sternness, “We should do what they say. They have their reasons.”

And Willie understood that Bhoj Narayan was a true man of the movement, the man in charge of this mission, and had to be heeded.

They went to the bazaar and spent five rupees on dal, cauliflower, and pickles; and another two rupees on coffee. They walked then in the half darkness of the town, talking of their past, each man identifying himself in a way that hadn’t been permitted in the camp. Willie spoke of England and his eighteen years in Africa.

Bhoj Narayan said, “I heard something about that. We must seem like nothing to you.”

Willie said, “It seems more exciting than it was. Words can give wrong ideas. The names of places can give wrong ideas. They have too many grand associations. When you are in the place itself, London, Africa, everything can seem ordinary. At school we learned a little comic poem by William Blake. I don’t think I remember it all. There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he. He ran away to Scotland, The people there to see. There he found that the ground was as hard, And the cherry was as red, As in England. So he stood in his shoes and he wondered . That was me. That was why I came looking for you. I was unhappy where I was. I had a strong idea that my place was in this world here.”

In the darkness as they walked Willie saw the post office. He thought, “I must try to pick my way back here tomorrow.”

Bhoj Narayan said his ancestors had been peasants. They had been driven out of their land and village by a great famine at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a backward caste. They had gone to a new British-built railway town, and there his grandfather had found work of some sort. His father had finished school and found a job in the state transport system. He had then become an accountant. His mother’s family had had the same kind of history. They had a cultured background. They were musicians. But they were of the same backward caste.

Willie said, “You are telling me a success story. Why are you in this movement? Why are you throwing everything away? You are a middle-class man now. Things can only get better for you and your family.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “Why are you in it?”

“A good question.”

Bhoj Narayan said with a little irritation, “But why?”

Willie, backing away from his earlier evasiveness, and the social distance it implied, said, “A long story. I suppose it’s the story of my life. I suppose it’s the way the world is made.”

“Same here. With people of feeling things can never be cut and dried. When you buy a machine you get a book of instructions. Men are not like that. I am proud of my family, proud of what they have done in the last hundred years. But at the same time I’ll tell you. When in the old days I heard about a landlord being killed, my heart sang. I wanted all the feudals to be killed. I wanted them all to be hanged and stay hanging until the flesh fell off their skeletons.”

Willie recognised Joseph’s language.

Bhoj Narayan said, “And I didn’t want others to do the killing. I wanted to be there myself. I wanted to show myself to them before they were killed. I wanted to see the surprise and fright in their eyes.”

Willie thought, “Is this true? Or is he trying to impress me?” He considered the features of the dark man, tried to imagine his family, tried to imagine the powerless past. He said, “I believe the famine that drove your people out of their village was the famine that drove my great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, out of their ancient temple. Isn’t it strange? We are linked more closely than we thought. And I discovered some years ago that Rudyard Kipling wrote a story about that famine. A love story, an English love story.”

Bhoj Narayan was not interested. They walked back towards the street of the tanners, to undress and wait for the night to pass; and Willie was locked then in that new chamber of consciousness, of smell and awfulness, but with the conviction that he would soon be living in it as in a complete world, and would survive.

In the morning he picked his way to the post office. On the old single-page air letter that he had not finished — where he had scratched out Kandapalli’s name and then had been worried about going on — he wrote:

I believe I am among the enemies of the man we talked about. I am not master of my movements. I will be staying here for two weeks. Please write me at the poste restante of this town. This letter will take one week to get to you. Your letter will take a week to get to me. I am depending on you .

He and Bhoj Narayan went to the bazaar at midday. The food was fresher at midday than in the evening. They ate with relish and then, as they walked about the town, Bhoj Narayan told more of his story. There was no need for Willie to probe.

Bhoj Narayan said, “I thought in my second year at the university I should give up my studies and join the guerrillas. I used to go with some friends to the tank on the edge of the town. I suppose it’s my old background, but I’ve always liked green. Grass and trees. It’s the way the world should be. We used to talk about what we might do. About joining the guerrillas. But we didn’t know how to go about doing anything. I could only think of approaching one of our teachers. He said he didn’t know how to put me in touch with the guerrillas. But he did. A man from the engineering department of the town came to see me at the students’ hostel one day. He gave me a date when he would be coming to take me to see the people I wanted to see. I promised to come with my friends. But the friends didn’t turn up when the time came. They were too frightened. They were too worldly. They loved life too much. So I went on my own. That was how it began. That was three years ago.”