Magic Seeds (7 page)

They ate quite well that evening, groundnut, rice flakes, and wild meat. In the morning Willie considered his companions. They were not young. They were city people, people who would have had each man his own reason for dropping out of the workaday world and joining the guerrillas.

During the day Willie thought, “Kandapalli preached the Mass Line. Kandapalli wished the villagers and the poor to fight their own battles. I am not among the poor and the villagers in this camp. There has been some mistake. I have fallen among the wrong people. I have come to the wrong revolution. I don’t like these faces. And yet I have to be with them. I have to get a message out to Sarojini or to Joseph. But I don’t know how. I am completely in the hands of these people.”

Two evenings later a rough man in military uniform came to him and said, “Tonight, man from Africa, you will do sentry duty.”

That night Willie cried, tears of rage, tears of fear, and in the dawn the cry of the peacock, after it had drunk from its forest pool, filled him with grief for the whole world.

T
HERE WERE ABOUT
forty or fifty people in the camp. Word went around, spread from newcomer to newcomer, that there were ten, even twenty, camps like this one in the liberated areas, the areas under the control of the guerrillas; and this gave a general confidence, even brought about a kind of swagger in the recruits, especially after olive uniforms were handed out. This happened on the fourth day. Somewhere, Willie thought, thinking back to what he had heard of the guerrillas in his part of Africa, some cloth-seller had been made to pay his dues to the movement in this cheap, lightweight olive cloth; and some village tailor had been asked to do some rough sewing. A peaked cloth cap came with the uniform; just above the visor was a star in red satin. The uniform and the cap spoke of drama, coming suddenly to forty or fifty lives; it also spoke reassuringly of organisation; and it gave everyone a new, easy, sheltering identity.

It was a training camp. The sentry, not speaking, making no sound, woke them up one by one while it was still dark. The rule of the camp was that there was to be no sound and no light at
night. Afterwards there came the calls of the noisy peacocks and other forest birds, fully a mile off, one bird in particular giving strident, desperate-sounding calls of alarm when it thought that some predator was getting too close to its eggs. At about six there was the roll call, and then for three hours they jogged and did physical exercises and sometimes practised crawling on the ground with a gun in their hands. For breakfast they had peanuts and rice flakes. And then they were lectured on guerrilla tactics. They were to make no sound when they were in the forest; they were to communicate by making bird calls, and they spent much time practising these bird calls. They were all very serious; no one laughed when the bird whistles went wrong. After lunch—which could mean deer or frogs or goat: this was not a vegetarian movement—they rested until mid-afternoon; and then they drilled and exercised for an hour and a half. The worst time then followed: the long evening, eleven hours long, without lights or proper speech, everyone talking only in whispers.

Willie thought, “I have never known such boredom. Ever since I have come to India I have known these terrible nights of boredom. I suppose it is a kind of training, a kind of asceticism, but for what I am not sure. I must look upon it as another chamber of experience. I must give no sign to these people that I am not absolutely with them.”

When he was staying at the Neo Anand Bhavan he had bought some pre-stamped air-letter sheets. He began one hot afternoon in his oppressive plastic tent to write a letter to Sarojini. It was the only time he could write.

He thought that was too open. He crossed out Kandapalli’s name, and then decided that it was too dangerous for him to write to Sarojini. He put the letter aside, in the kind of canvas backpack he had been given, and looked out through the flap at the white, melancholy light of the forest clearing and the exercise ground.

He thought, “This light denies everything. It denies beauty. It denies human possibility. Africa was gentler, as Joseph suggested. Perhaps I have been too long away. But I mustn’t think too much along those lines. The cause we talked about in Berlin is still good and true. That I know.”

The rule in the camp, enunciated by the leader—a man of about forty, who looked like a businessman or civil servant, and had possibly been a member of the cadets at his school—the rule was that the recruits should not ask too many questions of their fellows. They should simply accept them as wearers of the red star. And Willie lost himself in conjecture about the people around him. They were all people in their late thirties or early forties, Willie’s age, and he wondered what weakness or failure had caused them in mid-life to leave the outer world and to enter this strange chamber. He had been away from India too long. He couldn’t assess the backgrounds of the people around him. He could only try to read the faces and the physiques: the too-full, sensual mouth in some speaking of some kind of sexual perversion, the hard mean eyes in others, the bruised-seeming eyes of yet others that spoke of hard or abused childhoods and tormented adult lives. That was as far as he could read. Among these people seeking in various ways to revenge themselves on the world, he was among strangers.

On the tenth or eleventh night there was a great disturbance in the camp. The sentry panicked and began to shout, and all the camp was filled with alarm.

Somebody shouted, “The Greyhounds!”

That was the name of the special anti-guerrilla force within the police. They used guerrilla tactics: they were said to specialise in speed, secrecy, and surprise, the three S’s, and they attacked first. This was their well-publicised reputation, and a number of terrified recruits ran out from their plastic tents and made for the forest.

It was a false alarm. Some animal had stumbled into the camp and frightened the sentry.

Gradually then people were called back, shame-faced, many of them only in their underclothes, and angry, full of a new rage.

Willie thought, “Until tonight they thought they were the only ones with guns and training and discipline, the only ones with a programme. It made them brave. Now they have an idea of an enemy, and they are not so brave. They are only meaner. They will be very nasty tomorrow. I will have to be careful with them.”

Nothing was said by the leader that night. He was concerned in his businessman’s or bureaucrat’s way only to restore order. At dawn the routine of the camp was as before. It was only after breakfast (peanuts, rice flakes, the usual), and when the “military theory” class was to begin, that the leader spoke to the camp; and then he spoke not as a man wishing to enforce discipline, but as a man fearful of a mass desertion, fearful of violence and the break-up of his camp. He knew his audience. At the beginning of his talk they were restive, like people who had been found out and in childlike pique had returned to their old bruised identities, ready to forgo the shelter and comfort of their olive uniforms and the red satin stars on their caps, which only a few days before had appeared to make a new life so easy for them. They were waiting for rebuke, foreheads furrowed, eyes narrow and mean, lips pursed, cheeks puffed out: middle-aged
men full of childhood pique but capable of adult rage. They were not going to put up with rebuke. When it became clear that the leader had no intention of mocking them they gradually calmed down.

Willie thought, “Kandapalli was right. If I was concerned with making a revolution for the defeated and the insulted, if like Kandapalli I could cry easily at the thought of people’s unrevenged sorrows over the centuries, these are not the men I would want with me. I would go to the poor themselves.”

The leader said, “The sentry made a mistake last night and gave us all a big fright. I don’t think the sentry should be blamed. He is not used to the forest and wild animals, and too much was placed anyway on the shoulders of one man. From tonight we will have two sentries. But what happened last night shows how important it is for us at all times to be on our guard. We must always imagine that the enemy is observing us, and we must expect him at every turn of every road. Something is always to be learned from a misadventure, and as a result of last night we will develop our exercises. We will attempt over the next few days to get everyone familiar with certain defensive procedures. These procedures should become second nature to us all, at any time of day or night, and that will help in the next emergency.”

And for the next week or so military theory was not the boy-scout business of crawling on the ground with a gun and making bird whistles to the man in front. They practised protecting the camp. In one exercise they established a perimeter around the camp; in the other they fanned out far on two sides to prepared positions and waited to ambush any assault party.

Willie thought, “But what will happen when battle is joined, when the other side attacks? We are not being trained for that at
all. This is just the beginning of military theory. This is nothing. All these people will be good for is to fire a gun at someone who can’t fire back. And that is really what they want.”

But there was calm in the camp. Everyone was now waiting for orders.

The leader came to Willie one day and said, “Headquarters is taking an interest in you. They are detailing you for a special job. You will be leaving in two days. Get your things ready. You will go to the town of Dhulipur. Bhoj Narayan will go with you. He was the sentry who gave the false alarm. But that’s not why we are sending him. We are sending him because he is one of the best. We have rented a room for the two of you. We will give you a hundred and fifty rupees. At the end of two weeks we will send you more. You are to stay in your room for further instructions.”

As the leader spoke Willie found it easy to imagine him in a double-breasted suit. He was a man of the comfortable middle class, in his forties, fluent, experienced, easy in manner, confident, rather like a university teacher or a box-wallah executive for a big company. Willie could imagine him as the boy sergeant of the cadets at his school, playing the non-commissioned officer to the junior army officer who came twice a week to train and inspect the cadets. What had caused him to drop out of that easy life? Was it too great a security, was it a conviction that it would be easy for him to return to that world? Willie studied his face, looking for a clue in the smooth skin, the bland features, the too-quiet eyes, and then the idea, transmitted from the man himself, came to him. “His wife despises him, and has been cuckolding him for years. This is how he intends to revenge himself. What mischief is this elegant man going to cause?”

I
T WAS A DIFFICULT
journey to Dhulipur. It took more than a day. Willie put on his civilian clothes (themselves theatrical, a semi-peasant disguise), took some rations from the camp, hung the long fine peasant towel over his shoulder, and put on his leather slippers. They were still new. The slippers were to protect him from scorpions and other dangerous creatures, but it was hard for Willie, too used to socks, to walk in slippers. For much of the time his bare heels slipped off the shiny leather and trod the ground. Bhoj Narayan knew the way. First they walked out of the teak forest. That took more than three hours. Then they came to villages and little fields.

There was a peasant or a farmer Bhoj Narayan knew in one village, and to his thatched house they went in the afternoon when it was hot. The man was out, but his wife was welcoming. Willie and Bhoj Narayan sheltered in the open secondary hut, with cool thatched eaves that hung welcomingly low, shutting out much of the glare. Willie asked the woman of the house for sattoo, for which he had developed a taste; and he and Bhoj Narayan moistened it with a little water and ate and were content. The sattoo was made from millet. Before the sun went down the master of the house came, dark and sweated from his labours. He asked them to stay for the night in the open hut where they were. The calves were brought in, with their fodder. Rice gruel was offered to Willie and Bhoj Narayan. Willie was for accepting, but Bhoj Narayan said no, the millet sattoo was quite enough. Willie allowed himself to be guided by that. And then it was night, the long night that began when it was dark, with the fields outside where village people did everything they had to before settling down to sleep.

Early in the morning they left, to walk the five miles to the bus station. There they waited for a bus; when it came it took
them to a railway station; and there they waited for a passenger train to take them to the town of Dhulipur. They arrived in the afternoon.

Bhoj Narayan was now very much in command. He was a big dark man with broad shoulders and a slender waist. He had not talked much to Willie so far, following the rule of the camp, but now in the town he became more communicative as he began looking for the district in which the room had been hired for them. They looked and looked. When they asked, people looked at them in a strange way. At length, disbelievingly, they came to the tanners’ area. The smell of decomposing flesh and dog excrement was awful.

Willie said, “At least no one will come looking for us here.”

Bhoj Narayan said, “They are testing us. They wish to see whether we will break. Do you think you can stand it?”

Willie said, “It is possible to stand anything. We are tougher than we think. The people who live here have to stand it.”

The house in which the room had been rented for them was a small low house with a red-tile roof in a street of small low houses. There was an open gutter outside, and the walls of the rented room (shown them by one of the cricket people Joseph had talked about) had the same mottled multi-coloured quality as the walls of the Neo Anand Bhavan, as though all kinds of liquid impurities had worked their way up like a special kind of toxic damp.