V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Bhoj Narayan was still in his canvas cot when Willie got back to the street of the tanners. Willie thought, “I am sure he knows where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”

To avoid questions, he said, “I went to the town and had a coffee and an idli. I needed it.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “It’s only twelve rupees a night at the sugar factory. Go easy. There might be hard days ahead.”

Willie, sleepy again after his breakfast, undressed and got into his little cot. The thought of the long day weighed on him, and the thought of the labour of the night.

He thought, “Is there a point to all of this? There is a point for Bhoj Narayan. He knows what is being planned and how what we are doing here fits in. He has complete faith in it. I don’t have that faith. All I need now is the strength to go on, the strength just for tonight. Let me pray that that strength comes to me from some quarter, some very deep part of my spirit. That is how I must start living now, one day at a time, or one half-day at a time. I have sunk to the depths. I thought this street of the tanners was the limit. But the ghostly bagasse workers have taken me down several notches, and they will be there tonight again, surviving in all their wretchedness. Perhaps I needed to know about these true survivors. Perhaps this exposure to human nullity will do me good, will make me see more clearly.”

He surrendered to pictures of the turquoise flames on the small bodies of the night workers. The pictures became distorted, lost their sequence, and he fell asleep. The light had almost gone when he awakened. Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and he was thankful for that. He dressed and went to the bazaar and had a little leaf-cup of curried chickpeas. It was like excess, after the morning’s feast. It filled him up, and he was able when he came back to the room to wait patiently until eight, when Bhoj Narayan came back and it was time for them to start walking to the sugar factory.

And somehow, as if in answer to his need, the strength came to him for the labour of the night. What had been new and debilitating the previous night, in labour and images, was routine on this second night; that helped. After an hour (the Rolex marking off the time, as in his other life or lives) the comforting idea came to him that it was like doing a long and difficult drive in Africa. The thought of it was worrying beforehand, but once you started it became quite all right, quite mechanical: the road itself seemed to take you where you were going. All you had to do was to be calm and allow yourself to go.

Afterwards they stood in line with the others, sweated, coated with the sticky grey bagasse, wet, to get their twelve rupees.

Bhoj Narayan said, “Honest labour.”

Willie didn’t know how to deal with that. He didn’t know whether Bhoj Narayan was speaking ironically, mocking the way an employer or factory foreman might have spoken, or whether he was being serious and encouraging, and meant that this hard labour of theirs in the bagasse yard was serving the cause and for that reason was to be cherished.

When Willie woke up the next day Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and it occurred to Willie that he had probably gone out to make some roundabout contact with the movement. Bhoj Narayan’s attitude was still that everything was all right, that in due course fresh money and new instructions would come; and Willie no longer raised the matter with him.

It was one o’clock, no later than Willie had awakened the day before. His body was getting used to the hours; with a mind racing ahead to alarm, he thought that perhaps in two or three days he would be spending most of the hours of daylight in stupefied sleep, his most alert hours the hours of his bagasse labour.

He went to the hotel he had used the previous day and ordered coffee and steamed rice-cakes. The routine was comforting. The undersized waiter with his thick oily hair was still in his very dirty white drill uniform. It was perhaps a little dirtier now, or much dirtier; at this stage of grey and black, degrees of dirt were hard to assess.

Willie thought, “We will be doing the bagasse job for six more days. Perhaps then we’ll be somewhere else. Perhaps I will never see this waiter in a clean uniform. I am sure that is how he sees his uniform: always white and clean and ironed. Perhaps if he sees his uniform as it is he will lose all his style. His life will change.”

He went afterwards to the post office, and tapped at the poste restante counter, to see whether by some miracle there was another letter from Sarojini. Pigeonholes against the dark wall were full of letters of various sizes. The clerk when he came didn’t bother to look. He said, “Nothing today. Perhaps in three days. That’s when we get the air mail from Europe.”

He walked in the dingy business area of the little town. Monsoon and sun had mottled the walls and done away with their original colour. Only the signboards, shrill and competing, were new and bright with paint. He passed a branch of the Bank of Baroda. It was very dark inside. The ceiling fans turned slowly, not disturbing the jagged paper piles on desks, and the clerks at the counter were behind a metal grille.

Willie said, “Would it be possible to change some German marks here?”

“If you have a passport. Twenty-four rupees to a mark. We have a minimum charge of a hundred rupees. You have your passport?”

“Later. I will come back later.”

The idea of running away had come to him only the day before when he was writing to Sarojini. And he thought now, “If I change a hundred marks I will get twenty-three hundred rupees after the charges. That will be enough to get me where I am thinking of going. I must guard those marks with my life. Bhoj Narayan must never know.”

Bhoj Narayan said nothing about what he had done in the morning. But he had begun to worry. And three days later, when only three days of their work in the sugar factory were left to them, he said to Willie, “I feel there has been a calamity of some sort. We have to learn to live with the idea of calamity. I’ve never been let down before. And my feeling is that we should start thinking of making our way back to the camp in the teak forest.”

Willie thought, “That’s what you will be doing. You will be doing it on your own. I have my own plans. I will get away and make a fresh start. This is a mistake.”

The waiter was in a clean uniform that day. It altered him. He smiled and was full of welcome. There were the merest smudges on his pockets where for two or three hours he had been dipping his hands to fish out change.

Willie thought, “I never thought I would see this. It must be a sign.” And when he went to the post office the man said, “Something for you. I told you it was going to come in three days.”

Dear Willie, Our father is ill. Neither you nor I have been in touch with him for many years, and I suppose if you asked me I would have said that I was waiting for him to die, so that no one would be able to see what I had come from. I don’t know how you feel, but my shame was very great, and my happiest day was when Wolf came and took me away from that dishonest mess of a family and an ashram. But this news of the illness of the old man makes me think of things from his point of view. I suppose with age one can begin to do things like that. I see how damaged he was, through no fault of his own, and I see how he did the best with what was available to him. We are of another generation and another world. We have another idea of human possibility and we must not judge him too harshly. My heart is telling me that I should go and see him, although I know in my bones that when I get there I will find the same old mess and will be ashamed of them all and pining to leave all over again .