Magic Seeds (16 page)

Keso said, “Eight years.”

The stranger said, “When I meet people like you—and I do meet people like you from time to time—I can’t help thinking that you are only captains and majors. Beginners, on the first rung of ascension. Don’t mind it. I have been in the movement, in all the movements if you prefer, for thirty years, and I see no reason why I can’t go on for another thirty. If you are on your toes all the time you can’t be caught. That’s why I think of myself as a general. Or, if you think that is too boastful, a brigadier.”

Willie said, “How do you spend your time?”

“Avoiding capture, of course. Apart from that I am intensely bored. But in the middle of this boredom the soul never fails to sit in judgement on the world and never fails to find it worthless. It is not an easy thing to explain to outsiders. But it keeps me going.”

Willie said, “How did you start?”

“In the classical way. I was at the university. I wished to see how the poor lived. There was a certain amount of excited talk about them among the students. A scout for the movement—there were dozens of them around—arranged for me to see the poor. We met at a railway station and travelled through the night in a third-class coach on a very slow train. I was like a tourist, and my guide was like a travel courier. We came at last to our poor village. It was very poor. It never occurred to me to ask why my guide had chosen this particular village or how the movement had found it. There was no sanitation, of course. That seemed a big thing then. And there was very little food. My guide put questions to people and translated their replies for me. One woman said, ‘There has been no fire in my house for three days.’ She meant she hadn’t cooked for three days and she and her family hadn’t eaten for three days. I was immensely excited. At the end of that first evening the villagers sat around a fire in the open and sang songs. Whether they were doing that for us or for themselves, whether they did it every evening, I never thought to ask. All I knew was that I passionately wished to join the movement. The movement of the time, the movement of thirty years ago. That was arranged for me by my guide. It took time. I left the university and went to a small town. I was met by contacts. They said they were posting me to a particular village. It was a long walk from the small town. The main road became a dirt road, and then night came. It was March, so it was quite pleasant, not hot. I was not frightened. And then I came to the village. It was not too late. As soon as I saw the village I saw the house of the big landlord. It was a big house with a neat thatched roof. The poor people didn’t have neat thatched roofs. Their eaves were untrimmed. That big landlord was the man I had to kill. It was quite remarkable, on my very first day seeing the house of the man I had to kill. Seeing it just like that. If I was
another kind of person I would have thought it was the hand of God. Setting me on my path. Those were my instructions, to get the big landlord killed. I wasn’t to kill him myself. I was to get some peasant to do it. That was the ideology of the time, to turn the peasants into rebels, and through them to start the revolution. And, would you believe, just after seeing the house, in the darkness, I saw a peasant coming back from his work, late for some reason. Again, the hand of God. I introduced myself to the peasant. I said straight out, ‘Good evening, brother. I am a revolutionary. I need shelter for the night.’ He called me sir and invited me to his hut. When we got there he offered me his cowshed. It is the classic story of the revolution. It was a terrible cowshed, though now I have seen many much worse. We had some dreadful rice. The water came from a little stream. Not some storybook purling English stream, clear as crystal. This is India, my masters, and this was a dreadful muddy runnel. You had to boil whatever you could wring out of the smelly mess. I talked to my host about his poverty and his debt and the hardness of his life. He seemed surprised. I then invited him to kill his landlord. I was pushing it, don’t you think? My first night and everything. My peasant simply said no. I actually was quite relieved. I wasn’t hardened enough. I would have wanted to run away if the man had said, ‘What a good idea, sir. It’s been on my mind for some time. Come and watch me knife the bastard.’ What my peasant said was that he depended on his landlord for food and money for three months. To kill the landlord, he said, giving me some of his own wisdom in exchange for my theories, would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. His speech was full of sayings like that. I ran away as soon as I could the next morning. It’s a classic revolutionary story. Most people would have gone back to the town and taken a bus or train home, and gone back to their studies and to screwing the servant girls.
But I persevered. And here you see me, thirty years later. Still going among the peasants with that philosophy of murder.”

Willie said, “How do you spend the day?”

Keso said, “It was what I was going to ask him.”

“I am in somebody’s hut. I have spent the night there. No worries about rent and insurance and utilities. I get up early and go to the fields to do my stuff. I have got used to it now. I doubt whether I could go back to sitting in a little room with four walls. I go back to the hut, have a little of the peasant’s food. I read for a while. The classics: Marx, Trotsky, Mao, Lenin. Afterwards I visit various people in the village, arranging a meeting for some future date. I return. My host comes from the fields. We chat. Actually, we don’t. It’s hard to talk. We don’t have anything to say to one another. You can’t make yourself part of the life of the village. After another day or two I am off. I don’t want my host to get tired of me and tip off the police. In this way every day flows past, and every day is like every other day. I feel the life I am describing is similar to that of a high-powered executive.”

Willie said, “I don’t understand that.”

Keso said, “I don’t understand it either.”

The stranger said, “I mean the boredom. Everything is laid out for them. Once you get into those outfits you are all right for life. British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Unilever, Metal Box. They tell me that at Imperial the big boys just have lunch and go around checking the dates on cigarette packs in the shops.”

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.”

T
HEY 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.”

The squad leader said, “Is there a policeman or a police box at the intersection?”