V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

He had become agitated at the hint of distrust, and he spoke defensively. A little of his rhetorical style had gone. He didn’t wish now to stay with the squad, and as soon as he could — at the sight of a cluster of huts where he might go and rest — he excused himself.

Keso said, “Do you think he ever worked in one of those big companies?”

Willie said, “I feel he might have applied and failed. Probably if they had taken him at Metal Box or one of the others he would never have come out to the countryside and started asking peasants to kill people. That thing he said about captains and majors and being himself a general, that probably tells us that he tried for the army and the army didn’t want him. I’m a little angry with him.”

“That’s extreme.”

“I am angry with him because at first I thought that in spite of his clowning manner there was some wisdom in him, something I could use. I was listening very carefully, thinking that later on I would work out everything he was saying.”

Keso said, “He’s mad. I think he’s never been arrested because the police don’t think it is worth their while. The peasants probably think he is a joke.”

Willie thought, “But probably we are all like that to the villagers. Probably without knowing it we’ve all become a little mad or unbalanced. Keso would have liked to be a doctor. Now he lives this life and tries to tell himself it is real. It’s always easy to see the other man’s strangeness. We can see the madness of those villagers who wanted us to kill people for them. Those men with the badly made, twisted faces, as though they had literally had a terrible time being born. We can’t see our own strangeness. Though I have begun to feel my own.”

THEY CAME AT LAST to the base, where Willie had a room of his own. The wish of the high command to extend the liberated areas had failed; everyone knew that. But in spite of the general gloom Willie was happy to be in a place where he had already been. He felt he had ceased to be flung into space; he felt he might once again come to possess himself. He liked the low clean thatched roof — so protecting, especially when he was on his string bed — where he could store small things between the thatch and the rafters; he liked the plastered beaten-earth floor, hollow-sounding below his feet.

Willie was hoping to see the section leader again, the man with the soft, educated manner. But he was not around. The news was that he had deserted, had surrendered to the police after elaborate negotiations. He had claimed the bounty that had been offered for his arrest; guerrillas who surrendered could claim this bounty. Then he had made his way back to the big city from which he had come. There, for some days, he had stalked his estranged wife before shooting her dead. No one knew where he was now. Perhaps he had killed himself; more likely, with the freedom of movement his bounty would have given him, he was at large in the immense country, using all his guerrilla’s skill for disguise and concealment, and was perhaps even now shedding his old personality and the pain he had carried for years.

The news would have made a greater stir if at about the same time the police hadn’t arrested Kandapalli. That was by far the bigger event, though Kandapalli had now lost most of his following and was so little a security risk that the police took no special precautions when they arrested him or when they took him to court. What was most notable about him was the clippings book he carried with him all the time. In this book he had pasted newspaper photographs of children. There was some profound cause for emotion there, in the photographs of children, but Kandapalli couldn’t say; his mind had gone; all that was left him was this great emotion. Willie was profoundly moved, more moved than he had been in Berlin when he had first heard of Kandapalli from Sarojini: his passion for humanity, his closeness to tears. There was no means of being in touch with her now, and for some days, in a helpless kind of grief, which held grief for himself and the world, and every person and every animal who had been wounded, Willie tried to enter the mind of the deranged man. He tried to imagine the small old schoolteacher choosing pictures from the newspapers and pasting them in his book. What pictures would have attracted him, and why? But the man eluded him, remained a prisoner of his mind, forever in solitary confinement. The thought of the derangement of the mind, where no one could now reach him, the unimaginable twists and turns from present to past, was more affecting than news of the death of the man would have been.

Even enemies of the man were moved. Einstein thought that the movement should make some gesture, to show solidarity with the old revolutionary. He brought the matter up at the formal meeting of the section.

He said, “His disgrace disgraces us all. We have quarrelled with him, but we owe it to him to do something. We owe it to him for reviving the movement at a bad time, when it had been crushed and was all but dead. I propose that we kidnap a minister of the central government or, if that is beyond us, a minister of the local state. We will make it clear that we are doing it as a gesture in support of Kandapalli. I volunteer myself for the action. I have done some research. I have a certain man in mind, and I know when it can be done. All I need are three men and three pistols and a car. I will need another man to stand at the traffic lights near the minister’s house and to stop the cross-traffic for three or four seconds while we are making our getaway. This man will make believe he is doing it for the minister. The action itself should take no more than two minutes. I have actually done a dry run, and that took one minute and fifty seconds.”

An important squad leader said, “We shouldn’t do anything more at the present time to encourage the police to come down harder on us. But please outline your plan.”

“The minister’s house is at Aziznagar. We need to be there a week in advance, or four days at least, to get used to the layout of the streets. We will need a car. We will hire it from somewhere else. Three of us will sit in the car in the morning just outside the gates. The minister’s house is hidden from the street by a high wall. Perfect for us. A guard will come and ask us what we are doing. We will mark this guard down as the man to deal with when the time comes. We will say we are students from college — I will find out which one to say — and we want to ask the minister to come and talk to us or something like that. I will judge when the crowd is thinning and the time is ripe. I will get out of the car and walk past the guard to the minister’s front door. As I walk one of the men with me will shoot the guard in the hand or the foot. I will now be in the minister’s house. I will shoot anyone who is in my way. I will burst into the minister’s office or greeting room with a great deal of noise and shouting. I will shoot at his hand, rapid fire, shouting all the time. He will be very frightened. As soon as he is wounded I will hustle him out of the front door to the car blocking the gate. I have studied his physique. I can do it. I can hustle him out. All this has to be done with coolness and precision and determination. There will be no hesitation at any stage. We drive past the traffic lights, which will be fixed for us. Two minutes. Two bold, cool minutes. The action will be good for us. It will tell people we are still around.”

The squad leader said, “It’s nice and simple. Perhaps too simple.”

Einstein said, “The most effective things are simple and direct.”

Keso said, “I am worried about the traffic lights. Wouldn’t it be better to put them out of action?”

Einstein said, “Too early, and they’ll fix them. Too late, and there’ll be a jam at the intersection. Better someone walking to the intersection, if the lights are against us when we appear, and this person, very cool, pulling on official-looking white gloves and stopping the cross-traffic. If the lights are with us we have to do nothing at all.”