V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

One afternoon a week or so later Willie and Bhoj Narayan went to the scooter-man’s village. This wasn’t a village of uneven thatched roofs and dirt roads, the village of popular imagination. The roads were paved and the roofs were of local red curved tiles. Weavers were a backward caste, and the dalit or backward-caste area of the village began at a bend in the main village lane, but if you didn’t know it was a dalit area you would have missed it. The houses were like those that had gone before. The weavers sat in the late-afternoon shade in the yards in front of their houses and spun yarn into thread. The looms were in the houses; through open front doors people could be seen working them. It was an unhurried scene of some beauty; it was hard to imagine that this spinning and weaving, which looked so much like some precious protected folk craft, was done only for the village, for the very poor, and was a desperate business for the people concerned, run on very narrow margins. The spinning wheels were home-assembled, with old bicycle rims for the main wheels; every other part seemed to be made from twigs and twine and looked frail, ready to snap.

The scooter-man’s scooter was in his front yard, next to a spinning wheel. He lived with his brother and his brother’s family and the house was larger than the average. The two bedrooms were on the left, the rooms with the looms were on the right. The rooms were no more than ten or twelve feet deep, so that you were hardly in the house when you were out of it. At the back of the house on one side was the open kitchen and a large basket with corn cobs, bought for fuel. On the other side was the outhouse. Some richer person’s field came right up to the plot, right up to where the scooter-man’s brother had planted a fine-leaved tree, as yet quite small and slender, which in a couple of seasons would be cut down and used as fuel.

Space: how it always pressed, how in all the openness it always became minute. Willie was unwilling to work out the living arrangements of the house. He imagined there would be some kind of loft in each of the bedrooms. And he understood how, to a young man who had known the comparative freedom of a small town, to be reduced to the small space of this weaver’s house, and to have nothing to do, would be a kind of death.

They brought out low benches for Willie and Bhoj Narayan, and with ancient courtesies, as though they were very rich, they offered tea. Old deprivation showed on the face of the wife of the brother. Her cheeks were sunken and she looked about forty, though she could have been no more than twenty-five or twenty-eight. But Willie at the same time was moved to notice the care with which the brother’s wife had dressed for the occasion, in a new sari of muted colours, grey and black in a small oblong pattern, with a fringe of gold.

The scooter-man was beside himself with pleasure to have Willie and Bhoj Narayan in his house. He spoke a little too freely of his admiration for the movement, and from time to time Willie noticed a kind of disturbance in the brother’s eyes.

Willie thought, “There’s a little trouble here. Perhaps it’s the difference in ages, perhaps it’s the difference in education. One brother has been a trousers-man and has learned boredom. The older brother hasn’t. He or his wife may feel that they are sinking too deep in something they don’t understand.”

Afterwards, when Bhoj Narayan asked Willie, “What do you think?” Willie said, “Raja is all right.” Raja was the name of the scooter-man. “But I am not so sure of the brother or the brother’s wife. They are frightened. They don’t want trouble. They just want to do their weaving work and earn their four hundred rupees a month. How much do you think Raja borrowed from the bank for his scooter?”

“A scooter costs about seventy or seventy-five thousand rupees. That’s new. Raja’s scooter would have cost a good deal less. He’s probably borrowed thirty or forty thousand. The bank wouldn’t have given him more.”

“The elder brother probably thinks about that every night. He probably believes that Raja is over-educated and has got above himself and is heading for a fall.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “They adore Raja. They are very proud of him. They will do what he wants them to do.”

TWO OR THREE times a month they called out Raja to do some work for the movement. He took Willie or Bhoj Narayan or some others to where they had to go in a hurry. And, having this facility now, Willie went often to the post office in small towns, to check his poste restante letters from Germany. They got to know Willie in these post offices; they didn’t always ask him to show his passport. That had seemed to him charming, the Indian friendliness people spoke about; it occurred to him only later to be worried.

And then, after some months, Raja began to ferry supplies, with Willie or Bhoj Narayan, or on his own. There was a space below the passenger seat of the scooter, and it was also easy to fit a false floor. The pick-up and drop-off points always changed; it was understood they were only stages in a kind of relay. Bhoj Narayan acted as a coordinator; he knew a little more than Willie, but even he didn’t know everything. Supplies, mainly weapons, were being assembled for a new front somewhere. After all its recent losses the movement was cautious. It was using many couriers, each courier being used only once or twice a month; and supplies were being sent in small quantities, so that discovery or accident would result only in a small local loss, nothing to alter the larger plan.

Raja said to Willie one day, “Have you ever seen the police headquarters? Shall we go, just to have a look?”

“Why not?”

It had never occurred to Willie to go looking for the adversary. He had lived for too long now with his disconnected landscapes, his disconnected duties, with no true idea of the results of his actions. It hadn’t occurred to him that this other, well-mapped view of the area was also open to him, would be as easy as opening a book. And when they were on the main road, heading for the district headquarters, it was for a while like returning to an earlier, whole life.

The landscape acquired a friendlier feel. The neem and flamboyant shade trees beside the road, though for stretches the line of trees was broken, spoke of some old idea of benevolence that was still living on. The road acquired another feel, the feel of the working world, with the pleasures of that world — the truck stops with big painted signs, the cola advertisements, the smoky black kitchens at the back with earthen fireplaces on high platforms, and the brightly painted plastic tables and chairs (everything painted the colour of the cola advertisements) in the dusty yards at the front — so different in mood and promise from the self-sacrificing pleasures Willie had been living with for more than a year. Where there was water there were friendly small fields of paddy, maize, tobacco, cotton, sometimes potatoes, sometimes peppers. The fields of the liberated areas Willie knew had fallen into ruin: the old landlords and feudals had run away years before from the guerrilla chaos, and no secure new order had been established.

It was easy for Willie to return to old ways of feeling, and it was a shock when they came to the district headquarters, to the police area at one end of the little town, in a terrible noise of twenty or thirty taxi-scooters like Raja’s, and in a brown-blue billow of exhaust smoke, to see the stained old sandbags (speaking of sun and rain and sun again) and machine guns and the crumpled, much-used uniforms of the Central Reserve Police Force outside police headquarters, uniforms that spoke of a deadly seriousness: to see this effect of the disconnected things he had been doing, to understand in a new way that lives were at stake. The police parade ground, perhaps also the playing ground, was sandy; the kerbstones of the roads within, the camp roads, were newly whitewashed; the shade trees were big and old: like the rest of that police area, they would have had a history: they probably came from the British time. Raja, shouting above the screech and scrape of scooters, excitedly told Willie where in the main two-storeyed building the police commissioner’s rooms were, where the police guest rooms were, and where elsewhere in the compound, at one side of the parade or playing ground, the police welfare buildings were.