Magic Seeds

  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?”

  Einstein said, “I wouldn’t have wanted to do it if there was a police box. When we have passed, this person will walk calmly to the other side of the road, taking off his gloves, and will get into a car or a taxi, which will then leave the scene. So perhaps we will need a second car. If anyone at all notices they will think it’s another Indian street joker. Four men, two cars, three pistols.”

  Keso said, “I feel you are determined to do this, whatever we say.”

  Einstein said, “I think it will be a challenging thing to do. And it will be unexpected, since we have nothing against this particular minister. I like the unexpectedness. I think it will set an example to our people. Too many of us, when we plan a military action, can think only in the most banal way. So the other side are always waiting for us, and we fill the jails.”

  Afterwards Einstein and Willie talked.

  Einstein said, “I hear you had a rough time during that push into the interior. Extending the liberation area. The strategy was poor, and some people paid the price. We spread ourselves too thinly to do anything.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “The leaders are letting us down. Too much high living. Too many conferences in exotic places. Too much jostling to go abroad to do publicity and raise funds. By the way. You remember that weaver-caste fellow who betrayed us to the police a couple of years ago?”

  Willie said, “The Bhoj Narayan business?”

  “He wouldn’t be giving any evidence against anybody. I don’t think they would be booking Bhoj Narayan under Section 302.”

  Willie said, “What a relief.”

  “I wanted you to know. I know how close you two were.”

  “Are you going to do that action?”

  “I mustn’t talk any more about it. You can talk these things away, you know. It’s like mathematics when you’re young. It comes to you without your knowledge, when you are most silent.”

  Willie thought of the little weaver colony as he had last seen it: the red sky, the clean front yards where yarn was spun into thread, the three-wheeler scooter-taxi in front of the house where Raja lived with his elder brother. He remembered the cooking fire, festive-looking in the fading light of day, in the half-open kitchen of the leaf-cigarette makers a hundred yards away: people twice as well off, or half as poor, as the weavers; that early fire seeming to mark the difference between them. He remembered the elder brother’s wife in her cotton peasant skirt falling to the floor of the little house before Bhoj Narayan, holding his knees and pleading for her
brother-in-law’s life beside the home-made loom.

  He thought, “Who here would know that I cared for those men? Perhaps both brothers are better off dead. Perhaps it’s as Ramachandra said. For people like Raja and his brother the damage is already too great. This generation is lost, and perhaps the next as well. Perhaps both brothers have been spared an untold amount of useless striving and needless pain.”

  EVERY TWO WEEKS now there were district meetings. Squad leaders or their representatives came from liberated areas in different parts of the forest in a kind of mimicry of old-fashioned social life. The news they brought, unofficially, was of police arrests and the liquidation of squads, but the fiction of successful revolution and the ever-expanding liberated areas was still maintained, at least in the formal discussions, so that these discussions became more and more abstract. They might debate, for instance, with great seriousness, whether landlordism or imperialism was the greater contradiction. One man might become vehement about imperialism—which in the setting really felt very far away—and afterwards someone might say to Willie, “He would say that, of course. His father is a landlord, and when he is talking about imperialism what he is really saying is, ‘ Whatever you people do, stay away from my father and family.’ ” Or they might debate—they did it every two weeks, and everyone knew what would be said on either side—whether the peasantry or the industrial proletariat was going to bring about the revolution. In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words.

  In the middle of this came news of Einstein’s action. He had done it all as he had said, and it had failed. Einstein had said that the high wall of the minister’s official house was good for the action because it would hide Einstein and his friends in the kidnap car. But his research was not as thorough as he had boasted at the sector meeting. What the wall also did was hide the full security arrangements of the house from Einstein. He had thought that there was only one armed guard and he was at the gate. What he discovered, on the day of the action, and seconds away from the intended kidnap, was that there were two further armed guards inside. He decided to call the whole thing off, and almost as soon as he had entered the yard he pushed his way back past the guard at the gate and got into the car. The lights were against them, but the man they had deputed to stop the cross-traffic did his job beautifully, walking slowly to the middle of the road, pulling on big white gloves and stopping the traffic. Some people had thought that this was the weakest part of the plan. As it turned out, this was the only part that worked. And, as Einstein had said, it was hardly noticed.

  When he reappeared among them, he said, “Perhaps it’s for the best. Perhaps the police would have come down really hard on us.”

  Willie said, “You were pretty cool, to cancel at the last moment. I probably would have pressed on. The more I saw myself getting into a mess, the more I would have pressed on.”

  Einstein said, “All plans should have that little room for flexibility.”

  A senior man of the council of the movement came to the next section meeting. He was in his sixties, far older than Willie had expected. So perhaps the boastful madman who had talked about being in all the movements for thirty years was right in some things. He was also something of a dandy, the senior man of the council, tall and slender and with beautifully barbered, glossy grey hair. This again was something Willie hadn’t expected.

  Einstein, to turn the talk away from his own abandoned plan, said to the man of the council, “We really should stop talking about the liberated areas. We tell people in the universities that the forest is a liberated area, and we tell people in the forest that the universities are a liberated area. Unlikely things happen: these people sometimes meet. We are fooling nobody, and we are putting off the people we want to recruit.”

  The man of the council fell into a great rage. His face became twisted and he said, “Who are these people who will want to question me? Have they read the books I have read? Can they read those books? Can they begin to understand Marx and Lenin? I am not Kandapalli. These people will do as I say. They will stand when I tell them to stand, and sit when I tell them to sit. Have I made this long journey here to listen to this kind of rubbish? I might have been arrested at any time. I have come here to talk about new tactics, and I get this tosh.”

  His rage—the rage of a man who had for too long been used to having his own way—clouded the rest of the meeting, and no one raised any further serious points.

  Later Einstein said to Willie, “That man makes me feel like a fool. He makes us all fools. I cannot imagine that we have been doing what we have been doing for his sake.”

  Willie said (a little of his ancient London college wit unexpectedly coming back to him, overriding his caution), “Perhaps the big books he has been reading have been about the great rulers of the century.”

  THE NEW TACTICS that should have been discussed at that meeting came directly from the council as commands. Liberated areas were henceforth to be isolated and severely policed; people in these areas were to know only what the movement wanted them to know. Roads and bridges on the perimeter were to be blown up. There were to be no telephones, no newspapers from outside, no films, no electricity. There was to be a renewed emphasis on the old idea of liquidating the class enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no class enemy left in these villages, the people to be liquidated were the better off. The revolutionary madman Willie and Keso had met had spoken of the philosophy of murder as his revolutionary gift to the poor, the cause for which week after week he walked from village to village. Something like this philosophy was brought into play again, and presented as doctrine. Murders of class enemies—which now meant only peasants with a little too much land—were required now, to balance the successes of the police. Discipline in the squads was to be tightened up; squad members were to report on one another.

  Willie was reassigned to a new squad, and found himself suddenly among suspicious strangers. He lost the room in the low-eaved hut, which he had grown to think of as his. His squad was a road-destroying and bridge-destroying squad, and he lived in a tented camp, again constantly on the move. He became disorientated. He remembered the time when it consoled him, gave him a hold on things, to count the beds he had slept in. Such a hold was no longer possible for him. He wished now passionately only to save himself, to get in touch with himself again, to get away to the upper air. But he didn’t know where he was. His only consolation—and he wasn’t sure how much of a consolation it was—was that, amid all the strangers whose characters he didn’t want to read, whom (out of his great fatigue and disorientation now) he wished to keep as mysteries—his only consolation was that at the two-weekly meetings of the section he continued to see Einstein.

  Now there came the order for the squad to get villagers to kill better-off farmers. This was no longer optional, a goal that might be reached one day when conditions were suitable. This was an order, like a retail chain ordering its managers to improve sales. The council wanted figures.

  Willie and another man from the squad went with a gun to a village at dusk. Willie remembered the madman’s story of going to a village after nightfall and asking the first labourer he saw to kill the landlord. That had happened thirty years ago. And now Willie was living through it again. Only now there was no landlord.

  They stopped a labourer. He was dark, with a short turban, and had rough, hard hands. He looked well fed.

  The man with Willie said, “Good evening, brother. Who is the richest man in your village?”

  The villager seemed to know what they were leading up to. He said to Willie, “Please take your gun and go away.”

  The man with Willie said, “Why should we go away?”

  The villager said, “It will be all right for you two. You will go away to your nice houses. At the end of this business, if I follow you, I will get my arse beaten by somebody or other. Of that I am absolutely sure.”

  The
man with Willie said, “But if you kill the rich man, that will be one less man to oppress you.”

  The villager said to Willie, “You kill him for me. Besides, I don’t know how to use a gun.”

  Willie said, “I’ll show you how to use a gun.”

  The villager said, “It really will be much simpler for everybody if you killed him.”

  Willie said, “I’ll show you. You hold it like this, and look down here.”

  Down the sight of the gun a farmer came into view. He was coming down a slight hill. He was at the end of his day’s labour. Willie and the man with him and the villager were hidden by a thicket beside the village path.

  Looking down the gunsight at the man, the gun moving minute distances as if in response to the uncertainty or certainty in his mind, the scale of things altered for Willie, and he played with that change of scale. Something like this had happened in Portuguese Africa when, after a mass killing of settlers, the government had opened the police rifle range to people who wished to learn to shoot. Willie knew nothing of guns, but the change of scale in the world around him when he looked down the gunsight entranced him. It was like focusing on a flame in a dark room: a mystical moment that made him think of his father and the ashram where he dispensed this kind of enlightenment.

  Somebody said, “You have the rich man in your sights.”

  Without looking at the speaker, Willie recognised the voice of the commander of his new squad.

  The commander, not a young man, said, “We’ve been worried about you for some time. You cannot ask a man to do something you can’t do yourself. Shoot. Now.”

  And the figure who had been trembling in and out of the gunsight half spun to one side, as though he had been dealt a heavy blow, and then fell on the path on the slope.

  The squad commander said to the shocked villager, “You see. That’s all there is to it.”

  When his blood cooled, Willie thought, “I am among absolute maniacs.”