V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

Willie was excited by the prospect of favoured treatment. But his excitement didn’t last long. The people in the political cells (there was another) were free, always within the jail routine, to organise their activities. And very quickly Willie saw that this favoured treatment had taken him back to what he had walked away from. The routine the politicals established was very much like the routine of the first camp in the teak forest, but without guns and military training. At five thirty they were awakened. At six they assembled outside, and then for two and a half hours they worked on the jail’s vegetable plots and orchard. At nine they came back and had breakfast. After that they read the local regional newspapers (provided by the jail) and discussed the news. But the serious intellectual work of the morning was studying the texts of Mao and Lenin. This study, half pious, half mendacious, with people saying what they felt they had to say about the peasantry and the proletariat and the revolution, was sterile to Willie, always a waste of education and mind, and soon, in spite of the favoured treatment and even respect it secured in the jail, it became unbearable. He felt that what remained of his mind would rot away if for three or four hours a day he had to take part in these discussions. And even after the afternoon games and exercise, volleyball, jogging, which was meant to tire them out so that they could sleep, there were evening political discussions, shallow and lying and repetitive, with nothing new ever said, in the cell after lock-up time at six thirty.

Willie thought, “I will not last. I will not shake down, as that man said people shook down in the crowded bus when the bus began to move. In the bus you can shake down because you are all body. You are not asked to use mind. Here you have to use mind or half-mind in a terrible, corrupting way. Even sleep is poisoned, because you know what you are going to wake up to. One terrible day follows another. It is extraordinary to think that people do this to themselves.”

One Monday, about two months later, when the superintendent was doing his round with his retinue of lesser jail officials, Willie broke out of the line of standing prisoners. He said to the superintendent, “Sir, I would like to see you in your office, if that is possible.” The lower jail people, warder and head warder and chief head warder, were all for beating Willie back with their long staffs, but Willie’s civility and educated voice and his calling the superintendent sir acted like protection.

The superintendent said to the jailer, “Bring him to my office after the round.”

The hierarchy of the jail! It was like the army, it was like a business organisation, it was a little bit like the hierarchy of the movement. The foot-soldiers were the warder and head warder and chief head warder (though “warder” sounded such a good, polite word). The officers were the sub-jailer and the jailer (in spite of the brutal, key-jangling associations of the word, more suited, Willie always thought, to the lower men who padded about outside the cells). Above the sub-jailer and jailer was the deputy superintendent of jails and, at the very top, the superintendent of jails. When a prisoner came to the jail, he might know nothing about the hierarchy that now ruled his life, might not be able to read the uniforms, but soon his reaction to uniforms and titles was instinctive.

The superintendent’s office was panelled in some dark brown wood that had possibly been varnished. At the top of the wall a metal grille with a flat diamond pattern provided an air vent. On one panelled wall was a very large plan of the jail: the compounds, the cells, the assembly grounds, the vegetable garden, the orchard, the two perimeter walls, with every important exit marked with a thick red X.

On the superintendent’s shoulders were the shining metal initials of the state prison service.

Willie said, “I asked to see you, sir, because I wish to be moved from the cell where I am.”

The superintendent said, “But it’s the best cell in the jail. A nice, big space. A lot of open-air activity. And you have the most educated people there. Discussions and so on.”

Willie said, “I can’t stand it. I have had eight years of that sort of thing. I want to be with my own thoughts. Please put me among the ordinary criminals.”

“This is most unusual. It’s very rough in the other cells. We are trying to treat you here as the British treated the mahatma and Nehru and the others.”

“I know. But please move me.”

“It will not be easy for you. You are an educated man.”

“Let me try.”

“All right. But let me do it in two weeks or so. Let people forget that you came to see me. I don’t want them to believe that you asked to be moved. They might feel insulted, or they might think you were an informer, and they might make trouble for you in various ways. In a jail everybody is at war. You must remember that.”

Three weeks later Willie was moved to a cell in the other part of the jail. It was terrible. The cell was a long concrete room seemingly without furniture. All the way down the middle was a clear passageway about six feet wide. On either side of this passageway were the prisoners’ floor spaces. Willie’s strip of floor was about three feet wide, and he had a jail rug (in a bold blue pattern) on his strip of floor. That was all. No table, no cupboard: prisoners here kept such possessions as they had at the head of their floor space. Space was tight; one rug touched the other. The prisoners, sleeping or waking, kept their heads against the wall and their feet pointing towards the passageway. Each rug had a different pattern and colour; this helped every man to know his space (and was also useful to the warders).

Willie thought, “I can’t go and ask the superintendent to move me back to the politicals. And when I think about it, I am not sure that I want to go back. They have that lovely vegetable garden and fruit orchard to work in. But all that discussion of the newspapers in the morning, which is no discussion at all, and all that study of Mao and Lenin in the evening is too big a price. Even in Africa among the settlers there was nothing quite so bad. Perhaps if I were a stronger man I could do it all and not be affected. But I am not strong in that way.”

That first evening, as he was walking in the central open area between the jail rugs and the bed spaces, a very small man sprang up crying from one of the rugs and ran to Willie’s feet and held them. He was about four feet nine or ten inches, from Bangladesh, an illegal immigrant; whenever after each jail sentence he was taken to the border the Bangladeshis pushed him back, and he had some months of wandering until some new Indian jail claimed him. The sudden crying and leaping up and running to grasp the knees of some new official or visitor was one of his turns, something he did like a trained animal: his whole life was reduced to that.

A letter came from Sarojini.

Dear Willie, Our father is dead. He was cremated yesterday. I did not think to trouble you with this news, because I did not think you wanted to be troubled. Anyway, this is my news for you. I have decided to take over our father’s ashram. My thoughts have been running in that direction for some time, as I think you know. I have no religious wisdom, and I will not be able to offer people anything of what our father offered them. I think what I will do is to turn the ashram into a place of quiet and meditation, something with a Buddhist slant, which I know a little about, from Wolf. How strange it is that I, who had so little use for this kind of place all my life, should now do this. But life does this to people sometimes. Let me come and see you. I will explain things more fully face to face …