Willie said, “If he hadn’t gone to South Africa, if he hadn’t run into that other life, would he have done nothing? Would he have gone on in his old way?”
“It’s more than likely. But read the relevant chapters again. You will find that everything is fairly laid out, and you will make up your own mind.”
“How South Africa shocked him. You can feel the shame, the bewilderment. He was in no way prepared for it. That terrible incident in the overnight train, and then the indentured Tamil labourer with the bloody head coming to him for justice.”
Sarojini said, “Beaten up by the planter to whom he had been indentured. The transplanted serfs of the empire, with no rights at all. You could have done anything with them. The ancestors of our rose-sellers here in Berlin. They’ve travelled far in a hundred years. They can fight their own war now. That should make you feel good. We can’t put ourselves in Gandhi’s shoes. To be faced with the most casual kind of brutality and to have no power in one’s hands. Most of us would have run away and hidden. Most of the Indians did, and they still do. But Gandhi, with his holy innocence, thought that there was something he could do. That was how he began his political life, with this need to act. ‘What can I do?’ And that was how it was at the very end. Just before independence there were very bad communal riots in Bengal. He went there. Some people strewed broken bottles and glass over where he, the frail old mahatma, the man of peace, was to walk. He was by now swamped by his own religious search, but there was enough of the old lucidity left, and he was often during these days heard to say to himself, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’
“There wasn’t always much he could do. It’s easy to forget that. He wasn’t always the semi-nude mahatma. The semi-religious way he started with in South Africa—the commune, the idea of bread labour, all the mixed ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin—couldn’t do anything in that situation. In his autobiography his account of his twenty years in South Africa is vivid and full of incident, full of things he is doing. You might think that something big is happening, something that is going to change South Africa, but a lot of the struggle he is describing is personal and religious, and if you step back just a little you will see that the mahatma’s time in South Africa was a complete failure. He was forty-six when he gave up and went back to India. Five years older than you, Willie, and with nothing to show for twenty years of work. In India he was starting from scratch. He would have to think and think, then and later, about how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders. It might seem today that things were already happening, and that as the mahatma all he had to do in 1915 was to let himself be carried to the crest. It wasn’t like that. He made things happen. He created the wave. He was a mixture of thought and intuition. Thought, above all. He was a true revolutionary.”
And Willie said nothing.
She had taken him far away. She had given him the daily mental exercise of thinking himself back into more desperate places of the world he had seen or known. That had already become a habit of his mornings; and now, in an extension of this morning meditation, he found himself reconsidering his life in India and London, reconsidering Africa and his marriage, acknowledging everything in a new way, hiding nothing, submerging all the pathos of his nondescript past in an ennobling new ideal.
For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he had met in London and Africa. Gradually, with this pride, there came to him an unexpected joy, which was like further reward, the joy of knowing that he rejected everything he saw. Sarojini had told him that the people he saw lived for pleasure alone. They ate and watched television and counted their money; they had been reduced to a terrible simplicity. He saw the unnaturalness of this simplicity; at the same time he felt the excitement of the new movements of his heart and mind; and he felt above everything around him.
Five months before, in the lovely, shocking, refreshing winter, as a refugee from Africa, with no true place of his own to go back to, it had all seemed welcoming and blessed. The buildings hadn’t changed; the people hadn’t changed—all he could say was that he had learned to spot the harassed, heavy, middle-aged poor women from the east, two frontiers away. He remembered that time, that memory of his own happiness, very clearly. He didn’t reject it. It told him how far he had come.
That happiness, existing not in the real Berlin but in a special bubble—Sarojini’s apartment, Sarojini’s money, Sarojini’s conversation—couldn’t have endured. Twenty years before he would have wanted to hold on to that good time, would have tried to do, in Berlin, the city at the end of a narrow air corridor, what he had later done in Africa. It would have ended worse than Africa. He might have become like the Indian he met one day, an educated man in his thirties, with gold-rimmed glasses, who had come with high hopes to Berlin and was now a shiny-faced, fawning tramp in ragged clothes, with no place to sleep, his mind no longer whole, his breath very bad, a broken arm in a sling black with grime, complaining of his torments at the hands of young thugs.
In those five months he had come far. There had never been a time like that for him, when he had been without immediate anxiety, when he had not had to act with anyone, and when as in a fairy story he and his sister had become adults without suffering too much harm. He felt that everything he had thought and worked out in those five months was true. They issued out of a new serenity. Everything he had felt before, all the seemingly real longings that had taken him to Africa, were false. He felt no shame now; he could acknowledge everything; he saw that everything that had happened to him was a preparation for what was now to come.
TWO
Peacocks
THEY BEGAN TO WAIT for Kandapalli. But no word came from him. The summer began to fade.
Sarojini said, “You mustn’t be disheartened. This is just the first of many trials. It happens when you are doing something unusual, and Wolf says it wouldn’t be as easy for you as it would be for a tribal on the spot. They would be worried by exotics like you. We ourselves had a lot of trouble with Kandapalli’s people, and we were only making a film. If you were a tribal you would just have to go to someone in trousers—that’s the way they think of people in authority: trousers-people—and say, ‘Dada, I want to join the movement.’ And the trousers-man would say, ‘What is the name of your village? What is your caste? What is the name of your father?’ All the information needed would be in those simple replies, and it can be easily checked. They would need a little longer to work you out. We told them about our mother’s uncle, and we told them about your African background. We stressed the radical side.”
Willie said, “I would have liked to start without any stories. I would have liked to be myself. To make a clean start.”
She seemed not to hear. “You will have to do a lot of walking. You should practise now. Wear canvas shoes. Toughen up the soles of your feet.”
He spent hours walking in the sandy forests of Berlin. He let the paths lead him on. One afternoon he came to a sun-struck clearing, and before he could fully take in where he was he found himself walking between scores of naked, staring men stretched out on the long grass, among the bicycles that had no doubt brought some of them there. The bicycles lay on their sides on the grass, and the twisted postures of men and machines seemed oddly expectant and alike.
When he told Sarojini of the unnerving little adventure she said, “That’s a homosexual area. It’s well known. You should be careful. Otherwise you’ll be getting into trouble long before you get to Kandapalli.”
The leaves on some trees were beginning to turn, and day by day the light was taking a yellower tone.
One day Sarojini said, “At last. Wolf has had a letter from India from a man called Joseph. He’s a university lecturer. You can tell by the name that he’s a Christian.
He’s not underground. He’s very much in the open, and he takes care to keep his nose clean. All these movements have people like that. Useful for us, useful for them, useful for the authorities. Joseph will see you, and if he likes you he will pass you on.”
AND SO, AFTER more than twenty years, Willie saw India again. He had left India with very little money, the gift of his father; and he was going back with very little money, the gift of his sister.
India began for him in the airport in Frankfurt, in the little pen where passengers for India were assembled. He studied the Indian passengers there—people he most likely wasn’t going to see again after a few hours—more fearfully than he had studied the Tamils and other Indians in Berlin. He saw India in everything they wore and did. He was full of his mission, full of the revolution in his soul, and he felt a great distance from them. But detail by detail the India he was observing, in the airport pen, and then in the aircraft, the terrible India of Indian family life—the soft physiques, the way of eating, the ways of speech, the idea of the father, the idea of the mother, the crinkled, much-used plastic shop bags (sometimes with a long irrelevant printed name)—this India began to assault him, began to remind him of things he thought he had forgotten and put aside, things which his idea of his mission had obliterated; and the distance he felt from his fellow passengers diminished. After the long night, he felt something like panic at the thought of the India that was approaching, the India below the colour-destroying glare he could see from his window. He felt, “I thought of the two worlds, and I had a very good idea of the world to which I belonged. But now, really, I wish I could go back a few hours and stand outside the Patrick Hellmann shop in Berlin, or go to the oyster and champagne bar in the KDW.”
It was early morning when they landed, and he was better able to control his emotions. The light was already stinging, heat was already rising from the tarmac. The small, shabby airport building was full of movement and echoing noise. The Indian passengers from the aeroplane were already different, already at home, already (with briefcases and cardigans and the plastic bags from shops in famous foreign cities) with an authority that separated them from lesser local folk. The black-bladed ceiling fans were busy; the metal rods or shanks that fixed them to the ceiling were furry with oil and sifted dust.
Willie thought, “It’s an airport. I must think of it like that. I must think of all that that means.”
The carpentry was not what Willie expected in an airport building. It was not much above the carpentry of the rough beach-side weekend restaurants Willie had known in Africa (where roughness would have been part of the style and atmosphere). The concrete walls were whitewashed in a rough-and-ready way, with paint splashed beyond concrete on glass and wood; and for many inches above the terrazzo floor the walls were grimy from broom and dirty washing-water. A blue plastic bucket and a short dirty broom made of the ribs of coconut branches stood against the wall; not far away a small, dark, squatting woman in a camouflage of dark clothes moved slowly on her haunches, cleaning, giving the floor a suggestion of thinly spread grime.
Willie thought, “Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have seen what I am seeing now. I am seeing what I see because I have made myself another person. I cannot make myself that old person again. But I must go back to that old way of seeing. Otherwise my cause is lost before I have begun. I have come from a world of waste and appearances. I saw quite clearly some time ago that it was a simple world, where people had been simplified. I must not go back on that vision. I must understand that now I am among people of more complicated beliefs and social ideas, and at the same time in a world stripped of all style and artifice. This is an airport. It works. It is full of technically accomplished people. That is what I must see.”
Joseph lived in a provincial city some hundreds of miles away.
It was necessary for Willie to take a train. To take a train it was necessary for him to take a taxi to the railway station; and then, having found at the booking office (cave-like, hidden away from the fierce light of day, with very dim fluorescent lighting) that the trains for the next few days were full, it was necessary for him either to stay in one of the railway station’s accommodation rooms or to find a hotel. And soon India, with all its new definitions of things (taxi, hotel, railway station, waiting room, lavatory, restaurant), and all its new disciplines (squatting in the lavatory, eating only cooked food, avoiding water and soft fruit), engulfed him.
There is a kind of yoga in which the disciple is required to move very slowly, concentrating the while on what his mind is making his body do; until after months of practise (or, for the worldly and ungifted, perhaps years) the disciple feels each separate muscle move within himself, minutely obeying the impulses of his mind. For Willie, in those first days of return to India, the mechanics of day-to-day life had become a kind of yoga like that, a series of hurdles; every simple thing had to be re-thought, learned afresh.
(Yoga: shut away in his Indian hotel room, with the windows open to noise and smells, or in the street outside, Willie found himself, within his intense and fast-moving interior life, fixing intermittently on Africa, and remembering that near the end of the colonial time yoga had become something of a rage among middle-aged women, as though the simple shared recognition of spiritual and bodily perfection as an ideal was going to make their collapsing world more bearable.)
He had wondered for some time in Berlin about the books he should bring with him. His first idea was that after his long forest marches and in the silence of village huts he would need light reading. The reading habit had more or less left him in Africa, and all he could think of was Three Men in a Boat, which he had never finished, and a thriller of the 1930s by Freeman Wills Crofts called The Cask or The Cask Mystery. He had happened on a tattered paperback copy of the Crofts in somebody’s house in Africa. He had lost the book (or it had been taken back) before he had read very far, and the very faint memory of the mystery (London, a floating cask in the river, calculations about tides and currents) had remained with him, like a kind of poetry. But it occurred to him, before he began looking for those books in Berlin, that he would come to the end of them very quickly. And there was this further complication: those books would, with his complicity, create pictures in his head of a world for which he had no further use. So in an insidious way they were corrupting, and not at all as harmless and “light” as he thought.
He gave up the idea of books. But then one day, near the end of his walk, he had gone into an antique shop, attracted by its casual choked display of coloured glass and lamps and vases and other rich-looking and delicate things of the 1920s and 1930s which had somehow survived the war. There were books on one table, mainly paper-bound German books in the German black letter; but among them, and noticeable because of their faded cloth binding and English script, were English-language textbooks about algebra, advanced geometry, and mechanics and hydrostatics. These books had been printed in the 1920s, and the paper, from that earlier time of stringency, was cheap and grey; perhaps some student or teacher had brought these textbooks from England to Berlin. Willie had liked mathematics at school. He had liked the logic, the charm of solutions; and it occurred to him now that these were the books he would need in the forest. They would keep his mind alive; they would not repeat; they would move from lesson to lesson, stage to stage; they would offer no disturbing pictures of men and women in played-out, too-simple societies.
In his Indian hotel now, near the railway station, with a night and a day to spend before he could get on the train to Joseph’s town, Willie took the books out from his little canvas suitcase, to get started on his new discipline. He began with the geometry book. The ceiling light was very dim. He could barely see the faint print on the old grey paper. His straining eyes began to ache. To deal with the problems he needed paper and a pen or pencil. He had none of those things. So there was nothing he could do. But he couldn’t hide from himself the fact that the geometry book and the others were too hard for him. He had overesti
mated his powers; he needed to start at a lower level; and even then it was clear he would need a teacher and an encourager. He had been reading, or trying to read, in bed; there was no table in the little room. He put the books back in the canvas case.
He thought, “I would have had to get rid of those books anyway. They would have given me away.”
This failure, so simple, so quick, so comprehensive, before he had got started, filled him with gloom, made it hard for him to stay in the little room with the blotched walls, and even harder for him to go out into the warm, buzzing city. The books had given him a kind of pride, a kind of protection. Now he was naked. He ground out the night, ticking off the quarter-hours, and he ground out the next day. And all the way in the train to Joseph’s town his gloom grew; but all the time, through the night, through all the stops at squalling railway stations, the train was taking him on, whether he liked it or not, to what he had now committed himself to.
In the early morning, when the sun rose, the moving train cast a complete shadow from the top of the coaches to the wheels on the rails. He looked for his own shadow, and when he found it he played with it for a while, moving his head and hands and seeing the shadow answer. He thought, “That’s me.” It was oddly reassuring, seeing himself at this distance, possessed of life like everybody else.
THE TOWN IN which Joseph lived was big, but it was without a metropolitan feel. The road outside the station was a mess, with a lot of urgent shouting and excitement but very little movement. Everybody was in everybody else’s way. Pedal rickshaws and scooter rickshaws and taxis competed for space with horse-drawn or mule-drawn carriages that tilted dangerously downwards at the back, seemingly about to throw out their heavy load of women and children. There were various hotel agents about, and Willie, choosing at random, allowed himself to be led by one of these men to the Hotel Riviera. They took a carriage. “Modern, all modern,” the Riviera man said all the time, and then vanished as soon as he led Willie into the little lobby of the hotel, as though not wishing now to be held responsible for anything.