V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

But writing a letter wasn’t something that could be done just like that, even if he had had pen or pencil and paper. He could think of writing that letter only the next day, and then the sheet of writing paper that the jailer brought him, as an immense favour, was like a much handled page of an account book, narrow, narrowly ruled, torn at the left edge along perforations, rubber-stamped in purple with the name of the jail at the top on the left, and with a big, black-stamped number on the right. That sheet of paper — thin, curling back on itself at the unperforated edge — cast him down, turned his mind away from writing.

Over the next two or three days he learned the jail routine. And, having put the idea of imminent release out of his mind, he settled into his new life, as he had settled into the many other lives that had claimed him at various times. The five-thirty wake-up, the standpipes in the yard, the formality of tasteless jail meals, the tedium of outdoor time, the long idle hours on the floor during lock-up time: he sought to adapt to it with an extension of the yoga (as he used to think of it) with which for a long time, since he had come back to India (and perhaps before, perhaps all his life), he had been facing everyday acts and needs that had suddenly become painful or awkward. A yoga consciously practised until the conditions of each new difficult mode of life became familiar, became life itself.

One morning, a few days after he had come in, he was taken to a room at the front of the jail. The superintendent he liked was there. He liked him still, but at the end of the interview, which was about everything and nothing, he began to feel that his case was not as easy as he had believed. Einstein had spoken of some trouble with Willie’s “international connections.” That could only mean Sarojini and Wolf, and that of course was where his adventure had started. But at the next interview, with the superintendent and a colleague of the superintendent’s, nothing was said about that. There was the incident he had had to forget, the incident Einstein (who clearly knew more than he let on) said he didn’t want to hear about. There had been witnesses, and they might have gone to the police. But nothing was said about that in the front room of the jail. And it was only during the fourth interview that Willie understood that the superintendent and his colleague were interested in the killing of the three policemen. Willie, when he thought of that, was more concerned with the pathos and heroism of Ramachandra; the policemen, unseen, unknown, had died far away.

In the earlier interviews, when he had been fighting phantoms, he had said more than he knew. He learned now that the superintendent knew the name of everyone in Ramachandra’s squad and knew how close Willie had been to Ramachandra. Since the superintendent also knew the police side of the story his idea of what had happened was more complete than Willie’s.

Willie floundered. His heart gave way when he found that he was an accessory to the murder of three men and was going to be charged.

He thought, “How unfair it is. Most of my time in the movement, in fact nearly all my time, was spent in idleness. I was horribly bored most of the time. I was going to tell Sarojini in that semi-comic letter that I didn’t write how little I had done, how blameless my life as a revolutionary had been, and how idleness had driven me to surrender. But the superintendent has quite another idea of my life as a guerrilla. He takes me twenty times more seriously than I took myself. He wouldn’t believe that things merely happened around me. He just counts the dead bodies.”

WILLIE HAD LONG ago given up counting the beds he had slept in. The India of his childhood and adolescence; the three worried years in London, a student, as his passport said, but really only a drifter, willing himself away from what he had been, not knowing where he might fetch up and what form his life would take; then the eighteen years in Africa, fast and purposeless years, living somebody else’s life. He could count all the beds of those years, and the counting would give him a strange satisfaction, would show him that for all his passivity his life was amounting to something; something had grown around him.

But he had been undone by the India of his return. He could see no pattern, no thread. He had returned with an idea of action, of truly placing himself in the world. But he had become a floater, and the world had become more phantasmagoric than it had ever been. That unsettling feeling, of phantasmagoria, had come to him the day when poor Raja, with boyish excitement, had taken him for a ride in his three-wheel scooter, to show him “the enemy”: the local police headquarters with its old trees and sandy parade ground, watched over at the gate by heavily armed men of the reserve police force standing behind stained and dirty sandbags that had gone through a monsoon. Willie knew the road and its drab sights. But everything he saw on his excursion that day had a special quality. Everything was fresh and new. It was as though after being a long time below ground he had come up to the open. But he couldn’t stay there, couldn’t stay with that vision of freshness and newness. He had to go back with Raja and his scooter to the other world.

Phantasmagoria was confusing. He had at some time lost the ability to count the beds he had slept in; there was no longer any point; and he had given up. Now, in this new mode of experience that had befallen him — interviews, appearances in court, and being shifted about from jail to jail: he had had no idea of this other, whole world of prisons and a prison service and criminals — he started again, not going back to the very beginning, but starting with the day of his surrender.

The day came when he thought he should write to Sarojini. The jaunty mood had long ago left him; when at last he lay face down on the coarse, brightly coloured jail rug on the floor and began writing on the narrow ruled paper he was surprised by grief. He thought of his first night in the camp in the teak forest; all night the forest was full of the flappings and cries of birds and other creatures calling for help that wouldn’t come. The writing posture was awkward, and the narrow lines, when he tried to write between them, seemed to cramp his hand. In the end he thought he shouldn’t extend his obedience to the ruled lines. He let his writing spread over two lines. He needed more paper and he found that there was no trouble about that, once it was signed for. He had thought that a letter from jail could be on only one sheet; he hadn’t asked; he assumed that in jail the world had shrunk in every way.

Assuming that they made no trouble in the jail about his letter, it should get to Sarojini in Berlin in a week, assuming her address hadn’t changed. Assuming that she replied right away, and assuming that the people in the jail made no trouble about it, her reply would get to him in a week. Two weeks, then.

But two weeks passed, and three weeks, and four weeks. And there was no letter from Sarojini. The waiting was a strain, and a way of dealing with it was to give up altogether, to say that nothing was going to come. This was what Willie did. And, as it happened, his court life and jail life at this time had become dramatic.

He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He told himself it could have been worse. The jail to which he was finally taken had a big board above the front gate. On this board was painted, in tall, narrow letters, HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER. He saw it from the prison van as he went in, and he often thought about it. Was it Gandhian, this expression of a difficult kind of forgiveness, or was it Christian? It could have been both, since many of the mahatma’s ideas were also Christian. He often imagined the letters on the other side of the front wall of the jail. What was painted on the inside of the wall was THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT. This was not meant for the prisoners, but for visitors.