Authors: V.S. Naipaul
“This is most unusual. It’s very rough in the other cells. We are trying to treat you here as the British treated the mahatma and Nehru and the others.”
“I know. But please move me.”
“It will not be easy for you. You are an educated man.”
“Let me try.”
“All right. But let me do it in two weeks or so. Let people forget that you came to see me. I don’t want them to believe that you asked to be moved. They might feel insulted, or they might think you were an informer, and they might make trouble for you in various ways. In a jail everybody is at war. You must remember that.”
Three weeks later Willie was moved to a cell in the other part of the jail. It was terrible. The cell was a long concrete room seemingly without furniture. All the way down the middle was a clear passageway about six feet wide. On either side of this passageway were the prisoners’ floor spaces. Willie’s strip of floor was about three feet wide, and he had a jail rug (in a bold blue pattern) on his strip of floor. That was all. No table, no
cupboard: prisoners here kept such possessions as they had at the head of their floor space. Space was tight; one rug touched the other. The prisoners, sleeping or waking, kept their heads against the wall and their feet pointing towards the passageway. Each rug had a different pattern and colour; this helped every man to know his space (and was also useful to the warders).
Willie thought, “I can’t go and ask the superintendent to move me back to the politicals. And when I think about it, I am not sure that I want to go back. They have that lovely vegetable garden and fruit orchard to work in. But all that discussion of the newspapers in the morning, which is no discussion at all, and all that study of Mao and Lenin in the evening is too big a price. Even in Africa among the settlers there was nothing quite so bad. Perhaps if I were a stronger man I could do it all and not be affected. But I am not strong in that way.”
That first evening, as he was walking in the central open area between the jail rugs and the bed spaces, a very small man sprang up crying from one of the rugs and ran to Willie’s feet and held them. He was about four feet nine or ten inches, from Bangladesh, an illegal immigrant; whenever after each jail sentence he was taken to the border the Bangladeshis pushed him back, and he had some months of wandering until some new Indian jail claimed him. The sudden crying and leaping up and running to grasp the knees of some new official or visitor was one of his turns, something he did like a trained animal: his whole life was reduced to that.
A letter came from Sarojini.
Dear Willie, Our father is dead. He was cremated yesterday. I did not think to trouble you with this news, because I did not think you wanted to be troubled. Anyway, this is my news for you. I have decided to take over our father’s ashram. My
thoughts have been running in that direction for some time, as I think you know. I have no religious wisdom, and I will not be able to offer people anything of what our father offered them. I think what I will do is to turn the ashram into a place of quiet and meditation, something with a Buddhist slant, which I know a little about, from Wolf. How strange it is that I, who had so little use for this kind of place all my life, should now do this. But life does this to people sometimes. Let me come and see you. I will explain things more fully face to face …
He got a sheet of ruled paper from the warder and, lying on his rug and twisting his body a little over his neighbour’s space so that he could write on the low window sill of the cell, he wrote:
Dear Sarojini, You run from one extreme to the other. The idea of the ashram is an idea of death in life, and it goes against everything you have believed. What we discussed in Berlin remains true. I am grateful to you for making me face myself and what I come from. I consider that a gift of life. I am surrounded here by a kind of distress I don’t know how to deal with, but the ashram is not the way. Nor was that foolish war which I went to fight. That war was not yours or mine and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for. We talked about their oppression, but we were exploiting them all the time. Our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves. That was terrible to me, and it continues even here, where the talkers have favoured treatment and the poor are treated as the poor always are. They are mostly village people and they are undersized and thin. The most important thing about them is their small size. It is hard to associate them with the bigger crimes and the crimes of passion for which some of them are
being punished. Abduction, kidnapping. I suppose if you were a villager you would see them as criminal and dangerous, but if you see them from a distance, as I still see them, although I am close to them night and day, you would be moved by the workings of the human soul, so complete within those frail bodies. Those wild and hungry eyes haunt me. They seem to me to carry a distillation of the country’s unhappiness. I don’t think there is any one single simple action which can help. You can’t take a gun and kill that unhappiness. All you can do is to kill people
.
S
AROJINI CAME TO
see him. She wore a white sari—white the colour of grief—and of course she didn’t have to wait with the others who had come to see prisoners in Willie’s cell. Her manner, her speech, and her dress won her immediate regard, and she did not squat in the hot sun—in a low subdued queue, two persons wide—with the other visitors, under the gaze of the warders with their heavy staffs. She sat in a room in the front of the jail and Willie was called to see her. He liked her sari, and her general style, just as much as he had liked the jeans and chunky pullovers she had worn in Berlin.
She was enraged about the country people waiting in line in the sun to see their relations.
He said, “They don’t complain. They are happy to be in the queue. Some people make long journeys and wait all night and then in the morning they are turned away. Because they can’t tip the warders, or because they didn’t know they had to tip the warders. Money makes everything easy in the jail. The warders have to make a living, too, you know.”
“You are trying to shock me. But I expected that. It tells me you are in good spirits.”
“What we can really try to do is to get me in the hospital. There are about sixteen or twenty beds there. It’s a big, airy room, quite bare, but one isn’t looking for interior decoration in a jail. If we can slip the warders thirty or forty rupees a day, then my time in the jail becomes pure pleasure. I get an iron bed with a mattress, which is better than a rug on the floor, and all my meals are brought from the kitchen straight to me. Breakfast, lunch and dinner in bed. Like a hotel.”
“What about the sick people?”
“They are where they belong, in the cells. What did you expect?”
She said, quite seriously, “If I did it, would you go?”
“I might. I am getting tired of the cell. I also would like to get something to read. The other people can discuss Lenin and Mao until the cows come home. But the only thing they like you to read in the common cells is a religious book.”
“You’ll be a mental wreck by the time you leave.”
“I think you are right. I am coming to the end of my mental resources. Once in Africa I had arranged to meet someone in the town on the coast. At a café or something. For various reasons I was terribly late. More than an hour. Yet when I went to the café the man was there, calmly waiting. He was a Portuguese. I apologised. He said, ‘There is no need. I have a well-stocked mind.’ I thought that was very grand. Probably he had heard it from somebody else, but I made it my ideal. After that, whenever I was in a doctor’s waiting room, say, or a hospital outpatients department, I never ran to the dingy magazines to kill time. I examined my well-stocked mind. I’ve been doing a lot of that in my cell. But my mind is letting me down now. I am coming to the end of what it has. I’ve thought of our parents and my childhood. Actually, there’s a lot there. I’ve thought of London. I’ve thought of Africa. I’ve thought of Berlin. Very important. I’ve
thought of my years in the movement. If I were a religious man I would say that I was putting my spiritual life in order. Counting the beds I slept in.”
Two weeks after Sarojini’s visit he was transferred to the hospital ward. He received books from her and began to read again. He was dazzled by everything he read. Everything seemed miraculous. Every writer seemed a prodigy. Something like this used to happen to him when very long ago, in another life, as it now seemed, he had tried to write stories and was sometimes stuck, his mind clogged. Those days usually occurred when he was deep in a story. He would wonder how anyone ever had the courage to write a sentence. He might even look at an aspirin bottle or a cough syrup bottle and marvel at the confidence of the man who had written the directions and warnings. In some such way now a deep regard came to him for everyone who could put words together, and he was transported by everything he read. The experience was glorious, and he would think that it was probably worth coming to jail just for this, this heightening of intellectual pleasure, this opening up of something in life he knew little of.
Something unusual happened five months or so after he had gone to the hospital ward.
The superintendent was doing his Monday morning round. Willie felt the superintendent’s eyes on him and the first thought that came to him was that his time in the hospital ward was coming to an end. Sure enough, later that day a message came to Willie from the superintendent, relayed down the chain of command.
The next day Willie went to the superintendent’s dark-panelled office with the diamond pattern in iron over the air vent.
The superintendent said, “You are walking wounded, I see.”
Willie made a pleading gesture, asking for understanding.
“I will tell you why I called you. I’ve explained to you the
privileged position you enjoy in the jail and which is open to you at any moment to take advantage of. We operate under the same rules as in the British time. You gave an undertaking at the time of your surrender that you had done nothing that could be thought of as a heinous crime under Section 302. It was part of the package. All of you gave that undertaking. So we have the strange situation where hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed by your movement, but we have not been able to find a single one of you who did anything. In all your statements it was always someone else who killed or pulled the trigger. Suppose now that there is someone in the jail who wishes to change that statement. Someone who is actually willing to say that X or Y or Z had actually done a particular killing.”
Willie said, “Is there such a person?”
The superintendent said, “There may be. In a jail everybody is at war. I told you that.”
H
E WAS QUITE
lucid in the superintendent’s office. But later in his hospital bed his mind clouded and he was swamped by darkness. Cold fluids seemed to flow through his body. Something like real illness seemed to chill him. And yet all the time with the steadier part of his mind he was also thinking, as though he was filing away something for future use, “This is beautifully done. If you have to betray and damage someone, this is the way to do it. When it is least expected, and with no calling card.”
A Gandhi-capped prisoner brought his dinner from the jail kitchen. It was what it always was. A plastic bowl of lentil soup, thickened perhaps with flour (you couldn’t tell until you tasted it). And six pieces of flat bread, cooling and sweating fast.
When he woke up in the night, he thought, in the desolation of the hospital ward, “Yesterday I was happy.”
He had trained himself to stay away from the vegetable patches and the orchard where the politicals worked. But the next morning when he went to have a look he saw the man whom he feared to see: Einstein. His mind had fastened on him as the betrayer, and this sighting of him for the first time in the jail grounds was like a confirmation. Einstein, intuitively disliked at first sight (and the memory of that first dislike was always with Willie), intuitively distrusted, then a companion in bad times, and now distrusted again. Willie knew that Einstein would have felt about him what he had felt about Einstein. He had grown to believe, especially in those last years in the forest, that there was a neat reciprocity in relationships. If you liked a man you would invariably get on with him; if you didn’t feel easy with him he almost certainly felt the same way about you. In the jail Einstein and many of the others would have gone back to their hate, each man to his own, as to some secret treasure, something which in a time of uncertainty they could gaze on and be revivified. (Willie remembered the rhetorical and ignorant and boastful revolutionary they had met in the forest, a remnant of a long-defeated rebellion, who had been tramping through the villages for thirty years with his simple philosophy of murder, incapable now of any higher thought, and yet easily made timid.) It didn’t take much to see how in the jail Einstein, daily cherishing the private treasure of his hate, and for no other reason, perhaps for no reward, would find immense satisfaction in this betrayal of Willie.
After that sighting of Einstein Willie went back to his hospital bed. He asked the warder for a sheet of writing paper and wrote to Sarojini.
Two weeks later she came to see him. When he told her what had happened she said, “This is serious.”
And immediately he could see, in spite of her ashram life and
white cotton sari, her fixer’s mind at work. To agitate on behalf of political prisoners all over the world had been part of her political work. In the small room in the jail he could see her mind ranging fast over the possibilities.
She said, “Who published your book in London? The book of stories.”
He told her. It seemed like another life now.
“A good left-wing firm. Was it in 1958?”
“The year of the Notting Hill race riots in London.”
“Clearly those riots had an effect on you?” She was like a lawyer.
“I don’t know.”