V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

I said, “Little things drive people more than we sometimes imagine. I have so many causes of shame. In India, London and Africa. They are fresh after twenty years. I don’t think they will ever die. They will die only with me.”

Ramachandra said, “That is what I feel too.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON a group of young men came out of the forest as the squad marched by. They had been waiting for the squad perhaps all day; time here was almost without value. And it was possible to tell from their bright faces and eager manner that these young men were potential recruits, young men imprisoned in their village and dreaming of breaking out: dreaming of the town and modern dress and modern amusements, dreaming of a world where time would have more meaning, dreaming perhaps also, the more spirited among them, of upheaval and power. Such groups had been attaching themselves to the squad at various stages of the march; their names and parentage and villages had been noted down. But this group of young men was different from others. These young men had news; their news made them frantic.

They sought out the man with the important gun, recognising him as the commander. Ramachandra and they talked. After a while Ramachandra signalled to the column to halt.

Ramachandra said, “They say there’s an ambush prepared for us higher up.”

Willie said, “Who?”

“It could be anybody. If it’s true. It could be the police. It could be Kandapalli’s supporters. It could be men hired by that big farmer who wants to buy the land from the old feudal. They would regard us as enemies. It could even be villagers who have become tired of having us in their villages and want now to get rid of us. They know we don’t mean business. It is part of the mess we are in here. Everybody feels the old world is changing and nobody can see a clear way ahead. We have thrown away our chance and now there are hundreds of causes. If we had proper military training we would know how to deal with an ambush. But we didn’t want to use guns. We just did the boy-scout and cadet stuff. Shouldering arms and presenting arms and standing at ease. That is all right if you are the only one with a gun. But now there is someone else with a gun, and I don’t know what to do. All I feel is that I should go forward and try to kill him. I can’t ask you to follow me since I don’t know what to do. If there is an ambush and something happens to me, you should go back on your tracks. Now make yourselves scarce.”

Willie said, “Ramachandra.”

“I have a good gun.”

They waited in that part of the forest until it was dark. Then one of the young men who had brought the news of the ambush called to them from the forest path.

“They killed him.”

“Who was it?”

“The police. He crept right up to them and sprayed them with his gun. He killed three. That gave him away, and they killed him. This will get into the papers, I tell you.”

Willie said, “He killed three?”

“Yes, sir.”

It was like good news, after all. Willie thought, “He honoured his name in the end. In the Indian epic, Ramachandra is the highest kind of man. He is much more than a religious man. You can depend on him in all circumstances to behave well, to do the right thing.”

The young man who had brought the news said, “Terrible for you, to lose a gun.”

Some time later — when (according to Ramachandra’s last order) they were going back on their tracks, staying off the main forest path, moving slowly in the darkness, determined to march all night if they had to, to get away from the police party, if the police were following — when they had been some time on this silent, half-blind march, Willie thought, “I didn’t think of the dead policemen. I’ve forgotten myself. Now I’m truly lost. In every way. I don’t know what lies ahead or behind. My only cause now is to survive, to get out of this.”

AFTER TWO ANXIOUS days they came again to the village with the lord’s abandoned mansion, the lord’s abandoned straw-coloured fields (with the vivid green of fast-growing parasitic vines), and the orchards where branches had outgrown their strength, where starved-looking leaves, not the right colour, were few on spindly crusted twigs, and fruit was scattered and deceptive, with wasps making nests within the rotted, grey-white skins of sweet limes and lemons.

It was a different village for them. They had been stars for the two weeks they had been there. They had had guns and uniforms and peaked caps with the star the colour of blood, and their words had mattered (even if no one had really believed in them). Now that had changed; all the village knew about the police ambush and the death of the menacing squad commander. With no particular aggression, merely going about the small details of day-to-day village life with the self-righteous intensity of men who knew what was what, the villagers seemed to see through the returning men in uniform.

They looked for the three men they had left behind to organise the takeover of the lord’s land. It seemed staggering now, that they should have thought of attempting such a thing. It must have been awful for the three men. No one in the village knew where they were. No one even seemed to remember them. And it soon became clear to the remnant of Willie’s squad and Keso, the fat, dark stand-in commander, a failed medical student, that these men had deserted. Keso knew about desertions.

They had been given the use of huts when they had occupied and liberated the village. Now Keso thought it would have been wrong to ask and perhaps even dangerous to spend the night in the village. He ordered that they should continue on their march, doing what Ramachandra had said, going back the way they had come, stage by stage, to base.

Keso said, “You can’t help feeling that Ramachandra was right. We would have achieved a lot more if we had killed a few of these people whenever we liberated a village. We would also have been safer now.”

They didn’t know the forest well enough to stay away from the paths and avoid the villages. They began to think of the villagers as enemies, though they depended on them for water and food. Every night they camped half a mile or so outside a village; every night (with a remnant of their very rough military training) they posted an armed member of the squad as a sentry. That fact became known about them; it saved them from being looted by certain village people.

On the way out, Willie now realised, and during all his time with the movement, he had lived with the pastoral vision of the countryside and forest that was the basis of the movement’s thinking. He had persuaded himself that that was the countryside he saw; he had never questioned it. He had persuaded himself that outside the noise and rush and awfulness of cities was this quite different world where things followed an antique course, which it was the business of the revolution to destroy. This pastoral vision contained the idea that the peasant laboured and was oppressed. What this pastoral vision didn’t contain was the idea that the village — like those they had liberated on the march (and then let go of) and might one day with luck liberate again — was full of criminals, as limited and vicious and brutal as the setting, whose existence had nothing to do with the idea of labour and oppression.

Willie wondered how on the way out he had failed to see these village criminals. Perhaps Ramachandra, with his bony nervous fingers on his AK-47, had caused them to lie low. Now in every village the depleted squad was beset and provoked by criminals. In one village there was a pale-complexioned man on a horse and with a gun — how could they have ever missed him? — who came to their evening camp and shouted, “You are CIA, CIA. You should be shot.” Keso decided that they shouldn’t respond. It was the best thing to do, but it wasn’t easy. The man on horseback was a village thug, acting up for the village, making a show of the fearlessness which a while before he had preferred to hide.