V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

At one of his first meetings — in a railway settlement, in a railway house, where the furniture in the main room had been pushed back to the walls, and people were sitting on mattresses and sheets on the floor — Willie heard a pale-complexioned man say, “I have been eating cold rice for the last three days.” Willie didn’t treat this as a friendly conversation starter. He took it literally. He didn’t believe it, disliked the boasting, and he fixed his eyes on the man’s face a little longer than he should. The man noticed, and didn’t like it. He returned Willie’s gaze, hardness for hardness, while continuing to speak to the room. “But that’s no hardship for me. It’s the way I lived as a child.” Willie thought, “Oh, oh. I’ve made an enemy.” He tried afterwards to avoid the man’s gaze, but he was aware all evening of the man’s malevolence growing. The occasion was poisoned for him. He remembered his early distrust of Bhoj Narayan, the way he had judged a man who had never left India by the standards of another country. He didn’t know how to retrieve the situation with the eater of cold rice, and he learned later that evening that the man was the head of a squad, and perhaps a good deal more within the movement, a senior and important man. Willie was only a courier, doing what was thought of as semi-intellectual propaganda work, and on probation; it would be some time before he was admitted to membership of a squad.

Willie thought, “I once unthinkingly said ‘Good question’ to Bhoj Narayan, and for a time earned his hatred. Out of old habit, when this man was talking about eating cold rice, I looked at him more mockingly than I knew. And now he is my enemy. He will want to put me down. Like Bhoj Narayan with some other people, he will want to see the mockery in my eyes replaced by fear.”

His enemy was known as Einstein, and over the next few months Willie picked up various pieces of his story, which was legendary in the movement. He came of a peasant family. A primary school teacher spotted his mathematical talent and pushed him up as far as he could in a country setting. No one in that family had ever had higher education, and immense sacrifices were made, when the time came, to send the young man to a neighbouring small town where he could go to a university. A room, more properly a space six feet by four feet, was rented in the verandah of a washerman’s house for fifteen rupees a month. The smallness of his living space and the tininess of the sums he dealt in were part of the romance of his story.

Einstein’s routine as a student in the washerman’s house was famous. He rose at five, rolled up his bedding, and cleaned out his living space (Willie, old ways clinging to him, didn’t think that could take long). Then he washed his pots and pans (he kept them separate from the washerman’s) and boiled his rice over firewood in the kitchen part of the verandah. Willie noticed in the story that there was no room in Einstein’s student timetable for the gathering of firewood; perhaps on firewood days Einstein was up at four. He ate his rice when it was ready and went to his classes. When he came back in the afternoon he washed his clothes; he had only one suit of clothes. Then he cooked some more food, perhaps rice again, and ate and went to sleep. In between chores he did his studying.

The examinations for the Bachelor of Science degree came. Einstein found that he was at sea with the very first problem of the first paper. His mind went blank. He thought he should write a letter of apology to his father for his failure. He began to write, but then, as he wrote, an entirely novel way of solving the first problem presented itself to him. The rest of the examination came easily to him, and his novel solution of the first problem created a stir in the university. Everybody got to know about the letter of apology out of which, as in a dream, the solution had come; and it began to be said that he was in the great line of Indian twentieth-century mathematical geniuses. This talk, which he encouraged, began at last to affect him. He published a mathematical paper in an Indian journal. It was well received, and he thought that it had fallen to him to correct Einstein. This soon became a mania. He lost his university job and could get no other. He published no other paper. He returned to his village, dropped all the trappings of education (trousers, shirt tucked in, shoes and socks), and dreamed of destroying the world. When the movement appeared, he joined it.

Willie thought, “This man cannot start a revolution. He hates us all. I must make my way to Kandapalli and the other side.”

Then there came to him, at the poste restante of one of the towns he regularly visited, a letter from Sarojini.

Dear Willie, Our father is seriously ill and all his ashram work is suspended. I know you will feel that this is no great loss to the world, but I have begun to have other ideas. The ashram was a creation, say what you will about it. I suppose that is the effect the prospect of death has on us. The other news, which is just as bad, and perhaps even worse from your point of view, is that Kandapalli is not well. He is losing his grip, and nothing is weaker than a revolutionary who is losing his grip. People who admired the strong man and wished to share in his strength run from the weak man. His weakness becomes a kind of moral failing, mocking all his ideas, and that I fear is what is happening to Kandapalli and his followers. I feel I have landed you in a mess. I don’t know whether it is possible for you to get back to Joseph, or whether Joseph himself is part of the problem .

Willie thought, “It is too late now to worry about Joseph and his vicious son-in-law, filling that flat with tension. No one is more vain and vicious than the low wishing to set the record straight. I was worried about that son-in-law as soon as I saw him, with his twisted self-satisfied smile.”

BHOJ NARAYAN SAID one day, “We have an interesting new recruit. He owns a three-wheeler scooter-taxi. He comes of a simple weaver-caste background, but for some reason — perhaps a teacher, perhaps the example of a friend or distant relation, perhaps some insult — he was granted ambition. That’s the kind of person who’s attracted to us. They’ve begun to move, and they find they want to move faster. In the movement we’ve done research on those people. We’ve studied caste patterns in the villages.”

Willie thought, “You are my friend, Bhoj Narayan. But that’s your story too. That’s why you understand him.” And then a little later, not wishing to betray his friend even in thought, this extra idea came to Willie: “Perhaps it’s my story as well. Perhaps that’s where we all are. Perhaps that’s why we are so hard to manage.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “He sought our people out. He invited them to his house and gave them food. When the police repression was bad he offered his house as a hiding place. I think he might be useful in our courier work. We should go and check him out. His story is like Einstein’s, but without the brilliance. He went to a little town to study, but he didn’t get a degree. The family had to call him back to the village. They couldn’t afford the ten or twelve rupees’ rent for a space in the town, or the twenty or thirty rupees for the boy’s food. It’s pathetic. It makes you want to cry. He suffered when he went back to the village. He had got too used to town life. Do you know what town life was for him? It was going to a little tea shop or hotel and having a coffee and a cigarette in the morning. It was going to a half-rupee seat in a rough little cinema. It was wearing shoes and socks. It was wearing trousers and tucking in his shirt and walking like a man, not flopping about with country slippers and inside a long shirt. When he went back to the family’s weaver-caste house in the village he lost all of that at one blow. He had nothing to do. He wasn’t going to be a weaver. And he was bored out of his mind. You know what he said? ‘In the village it’s pure nature, not even a transistor.’ Just the long, empty days and the longer nights. In the end he got a bank loan and bought a scooter-taxi. At least it got him out of the village. But really it was his boredom that brought him to us. Once you learn about boredom in the village you are ready to be a revolutionary.”