Magic Seeds (6 page)

He stopped, as though having to feel for his place in a script. He took up the tin spittoon from below the settee. The handle, made from a strip of tin, was stylishly curved: craftsman’s work. The edge of the strip had been bent back on itself and soldered, to lose its sharpness; and the thicker, slightly irregular edge shone from handling. He held the cup for a while, rubbing his thumb along the edge of the handle, still seeming to feel for his place in the script which his son-in-law’s entry had disturbed.

At last he said, “But at the same time I have no faith in the human material we have left, after the centuries of slavery. Look at this little cricket of a girl here. Our servant.”

Willie looked at the very small hunchbacked figure who had come out from the kitchen to the sitting room and was moving about on her haunches, inches at a time, using a small broom of some soft rushes, making very small gestures. Her clothes were dark and muddy-coloured; they were like a camouflage, concealing her colour, concealing her features, denying her a personality. She was like a smaller version of the cleaning woman Willie had seen days before at the airport.

Joseph said, “She comes from a village. One of those villages
I’ve been telling you about, where people ran barefooted before and after the horse of the foreign lord and no one was allowed to cover his thighs in the presence of the lord. She is fifteen or sixteen. No one knows. She doesn’t know. Her village is full of people like her, very small, very thin. Cricket people, matchstick people. Their minds have gone after the centuries of malnourishment. Do you think you can make a revolution with her? It’s what Kandapalli thinks, and I wish him well. But I don’t somehow think it’s what you were expecting after Africa and Berlin.”

Willie said, “I wasn’t expecting anything.”

“When people here talk of the guerrillas they are talking of people like her. It’s not exciting. It’s not Che Guevara and strong men in military fatigues. In every other flat or apartment in this area there is a helpless woman like this from a village, and they will tell you it’s all right, the woman is going to fill out. The old lords have gone away. We are the new lords. People who don’t know will look at her and speak of the cruelty of Indian caste. In fact we are looking at the cruelty of history. And the most terrible thing is it can’t be avenged. The old lords oppressed and humiliated and injured for centuries. No one touched them. Now they’ve gone away. They’ve gone to the towns, they’ve gone to foreign countries. They’ve left these wretched people as their monument. This is what I meant when I said that you have no idea of the extent to which the victors won and the losers lost here. And it’s all hidden. When you compare this with Africa you will have to say that Africa is all light and clarity.”

The smells of food became stronger, filling Willie with old taboos and strengthening him in the idea of the unhappiness in the revolutionary’s little flat, where a daughter had already been made a kind of sacrifice. He didn’t want to be asked to stay. He made to get up.

Joseph said, “You are staying at the Riviera. You might not
think it’s much of a hotel. But for people here it is high-class and international. None of the people you are interested in will want to come to see you there. They will be too noticeable. There is an Indian place called the Neo Anand Bhavan, the new abode of peace, after the Nehru family house. Over here everything’s the neo this or the neo that. It’s a style. It’s the usual Indian thing, with the squat toilet and the bath bucket. Stay there for a week. The people you are interested in will get to know you are there.”

Willie went down in the rackety old elevator. The light had changed. It had turned gold. Night was about to fall. Dust hung in the golden light. But heedless children still played and shouted among the dust hills in the yard, and the voices of contented women still scolded. Just a little while before it had all seemed raw and crowded and hopeless. Now, seeing it for the second time, it was as if it were a tamed view, and this made him rejoice.

He thought, “It was never going to be easy, what I am doing.”

T
HE ACHE
of broken sleep was still in his bones, still in his head. But the actual sleepiness had gone. He went walking in the bazaar, the lights coming on around him, looking for the cheapest and simplest and safest cooked food he could find. He was not really hungry now, but he wished to practise whenever he could what he thought of as the new yoga of his day-to-day living, in which every act and need was to be worked out again, reduced to what was most basic. He was amazed to find how far he had come, how adaptable he was. A year ago or less there were, after the splendours and excesses of the colonial time, the deprivations and camp life, the siege conditions of Africa towards the end of the war. Just a few days before there was all the bustle and luxury of West Berlin. Just a few minutes before
there was the comparative comfort and order of Joseph’s kitchen. And now he was here, in the dim and varied lights of the bazaar, the smoky flambeau, the hurricane lamp, the pressure lamp, looking with excitement for what he might subsist on, wishing to take his needs down and ever further down. Soon, he knew, when he found himself in forest or countryside, this bazaar would appear an impossible luxury. There would be other foods, other austerities: he would be ready for them when they came. He was already in his own mind a kind of ascetic, almost a seeker. He had never known anything like it—Africa in the bad days had been the opposite of this, had been suffering alone—and it made him lightheaded.

He spent a penny or so on a dish of spicy chickpeas. It had been simmering for hours, and would be safe. It was served to him in a leaf bowl, a bowl made of a dried leaf pinned together with pieces of twig. The spices burnt his tongue, but he ate with relish, surrendering to his new simplicity. He went back to the Riviera, and the warmth in his stomach soon returned him to his interrupted sleep.

The next day he moved to the Neo Anand Bhavan, and after the exaltation of his night at the Riviera there followed the emptiest and most tormenting days Willie had ever known, days of waiting in an almost empty room with a strong sewer smell for unknown people to come and take him on to his destiny. The walls were a strange mottled colour, as though they had absorbed all kinds of vile liquids; below the coconut mat dust was at least a quarter of an inch thick; and the ceiling bulb gave hardly any light. He had thought in the beginning that he should always be there, in the room, waiting for the person who was going to come for him. It was only later that he thought that this person would have time on his hands and would be prepared to wait. So he prowled about the town, and found himself going
with many other people to the railway station, for the excitement of the trains, the crowds, the harsh calls of hawkers and the cries of wounded or beaten dogs.

One evening on the station platform he found a little swivel stand of very old American paperbacks, discarded stock, dirt seeming to have worked itself into the shiny covers, rather like the ancient electronic goods that on occasion turned up in certain traders’ shops in Africa, with the instruction leaflets yellow with age. He wanted nothing that would remind him of the world he had abjured. He rejected and rejected, and then at last he lighted on two books that seemed to meet his need. A book from the 1950s or 1960s about Harlem,
The Cool World
, a novel, told in the first person; and a book about the Incas of Peru, the
Royal Commentaries
, by a man partly of the Inca royal family. Willie could hardly believe his luck.

At the Neo Anand Bhavan they gave him a hurricane lantern to read by. He would have liked candles, for their old-fashioned romance, but they had no candles. And then, as before, when he had tried the mathematical books, he soon floundered. The
Royal Commentaries
required knowledge of a sort that Willie didn’t have; it very quickly became abstract. And
The Cool World
was simply too far away, too American, too New York, too full of allusions he couldn’t get.

Willie thought, “I have to understand now that, in this venture, books are a cheat. I have to depend on my own resources.”

It didn’t become easier for him at the Neo Anand Bhavan. He began then consciously to concentrate on the yoga of his hour-to-hour life, looking on each hour, each action, as challenging and important. No segment of time was to be wasted. Everything was to be part of his new discipline. And in this new discipline the idea of waiting on external events was to be banished.

He lived intensely; he became absorbed in himself. He found he had begun to deal with time.

And then one day the courier arrived. The courier was very young, almost a boy. He wore the local style of loincloth and long-tailed shirt.

He said to Willie, “I will come for you in seven days. I have to look for some of the others.”

Willie said, “What clothes should I wear?”

The courier didn’t appear to understand. He said, “What clothes do you have?” He might have been a college boy.

Willie spoke to him as though he was that. He said, “What would be best for me? Should I wear canvas shoes, or should I be barefoot?”

“Please don’t be barefoot. That will be asking for trouble. There are scorpions and all kinds of dangerous things on the ground. The local people wear ox-hide slippers.”

“What about food? You must tell me what to do.”

“Get some
sattoo
. It’s a kind of powdered roasted grain. You can buy it in the bazaar. It’s actually like sand when it’s dry. When you are hungry you mix it with a little water. Very little, just enough to soften it. It’s very tasty, and it lasts. It’s what people use when they travel. The other thing you might get is a local towel or shawl. Everyone here has a towel. It’s about four or five feet long, with tasselled ends, and about two feet wide. You wear it around the neck or over a shoulder. The material is very thin and fine. You can dry yourself with it after a bath, and it dries very quickly, in about twenty minutes. I will come for you in seven days. In the meantime I will report that I have found you.”

Willie went to the bazaar to buy
sattoo
. It wasn’t as easy as he thought. There were different kinds, made from different grains.

Willie, in his new mood, thought, “What ritual, what beauty.”

Seven days later the college boy came back for him. The college boy said, “Those other fellows made me waste a lot of time. They weren’t really interested. They were just talking. One of them was an only son. He had a bigger loyalty to his family. The other one just loved the good life.”

They went in the evening to the railway station, and there they took a passenger train. A passenger train was a slow train, stopping at all the halts. At every halt there was commotion and racket and pushing and shoving and grating voices raised in complaint or protest or just raised for the formality of the thing. At every halt there was dust and the smell of old tobacco and old cloth and old sweat. The schoolboy slept through most of it. Willie thought in the beginning, “I am going to have a shower at the end of this.” Then he thought that he wouldn’t: that wish for hour-to-hour comfort and cleanliness belonged to another kind of life, another way of experiencing. Better to let the dust and dirt and smells settle on him.

They travelled all night, but the passenger train had actually covered very little ground; and then in the bright light of morning the schoolboy left Willie, saying, “Someone will come for you here.”

Behind the screen doors and the thick walls the waiting room was dark. People, wrapped up from head to toe in blankets and dirty grey sheets, were sleeping on benches and the floor. At four o’clock that afternoon Willie’s second courier came, a tall, thin, dark man in a local loincloth of a gingham pattern, and they began walking.

After an hour Willie thought, “I no longer know where I am. I don’t think I will be able to pick my way back. I am in their hands now.”

They were now far from the railway town, far from the town. They were deep in the country, and it was getting dark.
They came to a village. Even in the dark Willie could see the trimmed eaves of the thatched roof of the important family of the village. The village was a huddle of houses and huts, back to back and side to side, with narrow angular lanes. They walked past all the good houses and stopped at the edge, at an open thatched hut. The owner was an outcast, and very dark. One of the cricket people Joseph had talked about, created by centuries of slavery and abuse and bad food. Willie did not think him especially friendly. The thatch of his hut was rough, untrimmed. The hut was about ten feet by ten feet. Half of it was living space and washing-up space; the other half, with a kind of loft, was sleeping space, for calves and hens as well as people.

Willie thought, “It’s pure nature now. Everything I have to do I will do in the bush.”

Later they ate a kind of rice gruel, thick and salty.

Willie thought, “They’ve been living like this for centuries. I have been practising my yoga, so to speak, for a few days, and have become obsessed by it. They have been practising a profounder kind of yoga, every day, every meal. That yoga is their life. And of course there would be days when there would be nothing at all to eat, not even this gruel. Please, let me be granted the strength to bear what I am seeing.”

And for the first time in his life Willie that evening fell asleep in his dirt. He and his guide rested all the next day in the hut while the owner went out to do his work. The next afternoon they began to walk again. They halted at night in another village, and spent the night again in a hut with a calf and hens. They ate rice flakes. There was no tea, no coffee, no hot drink. The water they drank was dirty, from a muddy brook.

Two days later they had left fields and villages behind and were in a teak forest. They came by moonlight that evening to a clearing in the forest. There were low olive-coloured plastic
tents around a cleared area. There were no lights, no fires. In the moonlight shadows were black and sharp.

Willie’s guide said, “No talking. No questions.”