V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

A Gandhi-capped prisoner brought his dinner from the jail kitchen. It was what it always was. A plastic bowl of lentil soup, thickened perhaps with flour (you couldn’t tell until you tasted it). And six pieces of flat bread, cooling and sweating fast.

When he woke up in the night, he thought, in the desolation of the hospital ward, “Yesterday I was happy.”

He had trained himself to stay away from the vegetable patches and the orchard where the politicals worked. But the next morning when he went to have a look he saw the man whom he feared to see: Einstein. His mind had fastened on him as the betrayer, and this sighting of him for the first time in the jail grounds was like a confirmation. Einstein, intuitively disliked at first sight (and the memory of that first dislike was always with Willie), intuitively distrusted, then a companion in bad times, and now distrusted again. Willie knew that Einstein would have felt about him what he had felt about Einstein. He had grown to believe, especially in those last years in the forest, that there was a neat reciprocity in relationships. If you liked a man you would invariably get on with him; if you didn’t feel easy with him he almost certainly felt the same way about you. In the jail Einstein and many of the others would have gone back to their hate, each man to his own, as to some secret treasure, something which in a time of uncertainty they could gaze on and be revivified. (Willie remembered the rhetorical and ignorant and boastful revolutionary they had met in the forest, a remnant of a long-defeated rebellion, who had been tramping through the villages for thirty years with his simple philosophy of murder, incapable now of any higher thought, and yet easily made timid.) It didn’t take much to see how in the jail Einstein, daily cherishing the private treasure of his hate, and for no other reason, perhaps for no reward, would find immense satisfaction in this betrayal of Willie.

After that sighting of Einstein Willie went back to his hospital bed. He asked the warder for a sheet of writing paper and wrote to Sarojini.

Two weeks later she came to see him. When he told her what had happened she said, “This is serious.”

And immediately he could see, in spite of her ashram life and white cotton sari, her fixer’s mind at work. To agitate on behalf of political prisoners all over the world had been part of her political work. In the small room in the jail he could see her mind ranging fast over the possibilities.

She said, “Who published your book in London? The book of stories.”

He told her. It seemed like another life now.

“A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?”

“The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London.”

“Clearly those riots had an effect on you?” She was like a lawyer.

“I don’t know.”

“Whether you know or not, it may be a good line to take. Were you associated with anyone important? People coming to the college to talk, things like that.”

“There was a Jamaican. He went to South America to work with Che Guevara, but they threw him out. Then he went to Jamaica and ran a night club. I don’t suppose that’s much good to you. There was also a lawyer. He used to do little broadcasts for the BBC. That’s how I met him. He helped a lot with the book.”

“Thirty years on he might be famous.”

He gave her the name, and she left him in an unreal mood, half living in the past and embarrassed by the dim memory of the false stories he had written in that time of darkness, half living in the hospital ward in the chill of his predicament.

ROGER, THE LAWYER, whose name Willie had given Sarojini, had written Willie a letter about the book a few weeks after it had been published. Willie had held on to the letter for years as to a magic charm. He had taken it to Africa and in the early years there he had often looked at it. As the Latin poet says , Roger had written in his old-fashioned educated way, books have their destiny, and this book may live in ways that may surprise you . Willie had seen in those words a kind of good prophecy. Nothing remarkable had befallen him, and in time he had put the prophecy aside. He had not thought to take the letter with him when he left Africa; and perhaps he would not have been able to find it: another thing lost in the mess of Africa at that time. But now in the jail Roger’s words came back to him and, as before, he held on to them as to a piece of good prophecy.

It began to seem like that when some weeks later the superintendent sent for him again.

“Still walking wounded,” the superintendent said, making his old joke. Then he said, his voice changing, “You never told us you were a writer.”

Willie said, “It was a long time ago.”

“That’s just it,” the superintendent said, lifting a sheet of paper from his desk. “It says here that you were a pioneer of modern Indian writing.”

And Willie understood that just as his father, thirty years ago, had by his begging letters to great men in England set certain wheels in motion that had eventually taken him to London, so now Sarojini, out of her great political experience, had begun to act on his behalf.

Six months later, under terms of a special amnesty, Willie was once again bound for London.

THE PLANE THAT took Willie to London taxied for a long time after it landed. It seemed to be going to the edge of the airport, and when at last people got off they had a very long walk back, matching the long taxiing out, to immigration and the centre of airport things. Luggage had to take a corresponding route back, and it was fifteen or twenty minutes before it began to arrive. Most of it was the pathetic luggage of the immigrant poor: cardboard boxes tied up with string; metal-edged wooden cases, new, but like old-fashioned steamer trunks, meant for bad weather at sea; enormous bulging suitcases (nearly all in some synthetic black material) that no man could easily shift or lift or carry by hand, and were meant more for the padded head of the Indian railway porter.

Willie felt old stirrings, the beginning of old grief. But then he thought, “I have been there. I have given part of my life and I have nothing to show for it. I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible.”

Roger was at the barrier outside, camouflaged among the taxi-drivers with name cards and the large, buzzing family groups waiting for the travellers with heavy baggage. In spite of himself Willie was looking for a man thirty years younger, and Roger was not immediately recognisable. At first sight he was like a man in disguise.

Willie apologised for making him wait.

Roger said, “I have learned to possess my soul in patience. The board told me that you had landed, and then it told me that you were most probably in the baggage hall.”

The voice and the tone were familiar. They recreated the vanished man, the man Willie remembered, who was now like someone hidden within the person before him. The effect was disturbing.

Later, when Willie’s small suitcase was in the boot of Roger’s car, and parking charges had been settled at the machine, Roger said, “It’s like being at the theatre. But in real life it’s unnerving. The second act ends, and after the interval the man comes out with a powdered wig and a creased face. You see him as old. Old age can often look like a moral infirmity, and in real life to see someone suddenly old is like seeing a moral infirmity made suddenly clear. And then you understand that the other man is looking at you in the same way. Do you know anyone here? Have you kept in touch?”