V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Willie thought, “The waiter’s clean white uniform was a sign. That idea of changing a hundred marks into rupees and making my way back to the ashram was a bad idea. It is cowardly. It is against all my knowledge of the world. I must never think of it again.”

When he went back to the street of the tanners he said to Bhoj Narayan, “You are right. We should start thinking of making our way back to the camp. If there has been a calamity they will need us all the more.”

They were very close then, and that afternoon in the town, and walking to the factory, and during the hours of work, and during the walk back just before dawn. And Willie for the first time felt something like companionship and affection for the dark man.

He thought, “I have never had this feeling for any man. It is wonderful and enriching, this feeling of friendship. I have waited forty years for it. This business is working out.”

They were awakened about noon by a commotion outside their house: many harsh voices speaking at once. The harsh voices were the voices of the tanners, as though they had developed this special grinding quality of voice to compensate for the high smell in which they lived. The light around and above the door was dazzling. Willie was for looking out. Bhoj Narayan pulled him to one side. He said, “Somebody is looking for us. It is better for me to deal with it. I will know how to talk.” He dressed and went out into the commotion, which immediately became more of a commotion, but then was stilled by the authority of his new voice. The voices moved away from the house, and a few minutes later Bhoj Narayan came back with a man in what Willie could now recognise as the peasant disguise people in the movement used.

Bhoj Narayan said, “I never thought we were going to be let down. But we almost gave you up. We’ve been living on air for a week.”

The mock-peasant said, wiping his face with the long thin towel hanging over his shoulder, like an actor growing into his part, “We’ve been under great pressure. The Greyhounds. We’ve lost some people. But you were not forgotten. I’ve brought you your money, and your instructions.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “How much?”

“Five hundred rupees.”

“Let’s go into the town. There are now three of us outsiders in one little room in the settlement, and we’ve drawn a lot of attention to ourselves. That could be unhealthy.”

The mock-peasant said, “I had to ask. Perhaps I didn’t use the right words. And they became suspicious.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “You probably tried to be funny.”

He and the newcomer walked ahead. They all came together again at the hotel where Willie had his coffee and rice-cakes. The waiter’s uniform was degrading fast.

Bhoj Narayan said to Willie, “The leadership are taking quite an interest in you. You’ve hardly been in the movement, but already they want you to be a courier.”

Willie said, “What does a courier do?”

“He takes messages from one area to another, passes on instructions. He’s not a fighter, he never knows the whole situation, but he’s important. He might do other things as well, depending on the situation. He might ferry arms from point A to point B. The point about a good courier is that he has to look OK everywhere. He must never stand out. And you do that very well, Willie. Have you ever watched a street? I have, watching for policemen in disguise, and it doesn’t take long to spot the people in a street who don’t belong. Even trained people. They can’t help it. They give themselves away in twenty ways. But for some reason Willie looks at home everywhere. Even in the bagasse yard he looked at home.”

Willie said, “It’s the one thing I have worked at all my life: not being at home anywhere, but looking at home.”

THE MOVEMENT HAD suffered badly from police action in a certain sector, had lost a whole squad, and to take pressure off other squads in that sector the leadership — far off, mysterious — had decided to open a new front in another area which had so far, in the language of guerrilla war, been untroubled.

Until then, for Willie the guerrilla territory had been a series of unconnected landscapes — forest, village, fields, small town. Now as a courier, with Bhoj Narayan as his guide and superior, the landscapes began to join up. He was always on the move, on foot in the villages, in three-wheeler scooters or buses on the high roads, or in trains. He was on no police list as yet; he could travel openly; this was part of his value as a courier. This being on the move pleased him, gave him a feeling of purpose and drama, though he could only intuit the general guerrilla situation. Part of his business as a man who travelled was to give encouragement, to exaggerate the extent of the liberated areas, to suggest that in many areas the war was almost on the point of being won, and required only one last push.

He spent more time in towns and it became possible for him to receive letters from Sarojini. In the towns he also began to eat better food. Strangely, the food in the countryside — where the food was grown — was bad; in the town every day could be a feast day. In the villages, when times were good, the peasant heaped his plate or leaf with grain, and was content to add only flavourings of various sorts; in the towns even poor people ate smaller quantities of grain, and more vegetables and lentils. Because he was eating better Willie became less liable to small illnesses and the depressions they could bring on.

And for the first time since his two weeks in the camp in the teak forest, he began as a courier to get some better idea of the people who were his comrades in the movement. His impressions in the camp had not been good, but now with his deep relationship with Bhoj Narayan, a relationship which in the beginning had not gone well, he controlled his wish to see the flaws in people.

Once every two weeks or so there would be a meeting of senior people from various sectors. Willie helped to arrange these meetings. He was present at many of them. They were usually in a town and they could be risky, since any unusual gathering would have been spotted by the local people and reported to the police. So each man or each couple of men had their own contact in the town, and aimed to arrive at the contact’s house in the early evening, after a journey which could be quite long, could last a day or more, could involve day-long walks on the embankments between fields, away from the dangerous public roads. They came in clothes that would not draw attention. Disguise mattered. The instructions were that on the road they should dress as they might have dressed in the villages. Goatherds or weavers, or people who were pretending to be those things, wore blanket shawls which hid almost everything about a man.

It was from the contact that people found out, when they arrived, where in the town the meeting was to be. Sometimes they went then to the roof of the contact’s house and changed into less sweated clothes; or they changed from workaday country clothes, the local loincloth and the long shirt with big pockets at the sides and the brightly coloured thin towel on the shoulder, to town clothes, trousers and shirt or long tunic. Sometimes, for all their revolutionary talk, they wished to wear trousers to be seen as trousers-people, to give themselves a little more authority with their fellows during the discussions. They took off their rough village slippers once they were inside the meeting house; but their feet remained scratched and marked with deep dirt even after washing and, with the scattering of grubby blanket shawls, gave the gathering a village feel.

People came to the town to talk, to receive instructions, to do their self-criticism sessions. But they also came to eat, to savour the simplest town food, even to taste proper granular salt. And this suppressed simple greed led to an inverted kind of boasting, with people talking competitively of the austerity of their lives in the villages.