Authors: V.S. Naipaul
Willie thought, “I must do something to fight this smell. I must try to overcome it mentally.”
But he couldn’t. And then, as he had done at various points in his recent journey (and just as sometimes in the past, feeling lost in Africa, unable to pick his way back to safety or to what he would be easy with, and with no one to confess his anxiety to, he had taken to counting the different beds he had slept in since he
was born, to keep track of things), so now in the street of the tanners he began re-living the stages of his descent in the past year. From the desolation and real scarcities of a broken-down estate house in an abandoned Portuguese colony in Africa; to the flat in Charlottenburg in Berlin which at first had seemed to him a place looted and bare and unkempt and cold, speaking of postwar neglect, and full of earlier ghosts he could scarcely imagine; to the airport town in India, to the Riviera Hotel, to the Neo Anand Bhavan, to the guerrilla camp in the teak forest, and now this shock of the tanneries in a small town he didn’t know and wouldn’t be able to find on a map: separate chambers of experience and sensibility, each one a violation with which he in the end would live as though it was a complete world.
It was in this great stench of the street of the tanners that that evening he and Bhoj Narayan became close. As though it had needed that particular calamity (as it appeared) to bring them together. They went out walking, away from the smoky flambeaux of the tanneries, to the dim fluorescent lights of what to Willie now seemed the purer town, the bazaar (its flies now asleep) and the area around the railway station.
Willie said, “They’ve given us one hundred and fifty rupees for fourteen days. That’s ten rupees a day. In Berlin you wouldn’t be able to buy a cup of coffee with that. Do you think they expect us to spend our own money?”
Bhoj Narayan said, with a touch of sternness, “We should do what they say. They have their reasons.”
And Willie understood that Bhoj Narayan was a true man of the movement, the man in charge of this mission, and had to be heeded.
They went to the bazaar and spent five rupees on dal, cauliflower, and pickles; and another two rupees on coffee. They walked then in the half darkness of the town, talking of their
past, each man identifying himself in a way that hadn’t been permitted in the camp. Willie spoke of England and his eighteen years in Africa.
Bhoj Narayan said, “I heard something about that. We must seem like nothing to you.”
Willie said, “It seems more exciting than it was. Words can give wrong ideas. The names of places can give wrong ideas. They have too many grand associations. When you are in the place itself, London, Africa, everything can seem ordinary. At school we learned a little comic poem by William Blake. I don’t think I remember it all.
There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he. He ran away to Scotland, The people there to see. There he found that the ground was as hard, And the cherry was as red, As in England. So he stood in his shoes and he wondered
. That was me. That was why I came looking for you. I was unhappy where I was. I had a strong idea that my place was in this world here.”
In the darkness as they walked Willie saw the post office. He thought, “I must try to pick my way back here tomorrow.”
Bhoj Narayan said his ancestors had been peasants. They had been driven out of their land and village by a great famine at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a backward caste. They had gone to a new British-built railway town, and there his grandfather had found work of some sort. His father had finished school and found a job in the state transport system. He had then become an accountant. His mother’s family had had the same kind of history. They had a cultured background. They were musicians. But they were of the same backward caste.
Willie said, “You are telling me a success story. Why are you in this movement? Why are you throwing everything away? You are a middle-class man now. Things can only get better for you and your family.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “Why are you in it?”
“A good question.”
Bhoj Narayan said with a little irritation, “But why?”
Willie, backing away from his earlier evasiveness, and the social distance it implied, said, “A long story. I suppose it’s the story of my life. I suppose it’s the way the world is made.”
“Same here. With people of feeling things can never be cut and dried. When you buy a machine you get a book of instructions. Men are not like that. I am proud of my family, proud of what they have done in the last hundred years. But at the same time I’ll tell you. When in the old days I heard about a landlord being killed, my heart sang. I wanted all the feudals to be killed. I wanted them all to be hanged and stay hanging until the flesh fell off their skeletons.”
Willie recognised Joseph’s language.
Bhoj Narayan said, “And I didn’t want others to do the killing. I wanted to be there myself. I wanted to show myself to them before they were killed. I wanted to see the surprise and fright in their eyes.”
Willie thought, “Is this true? Or is he trying to impress me?” He considered the features of the dark man, tried to imagine his family, tried to imagine the powerless past. He said, “I believe the famine that drove your people out of their village was the famine that drove my great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, out of their ancient temple. Isn’t it strange? We are linked more closely than we thought. And I discovered some years ago that Rudyard Kipling wrote a story about that famine. A love story, an English love story.”
Bhoj Narayan was not interested. They walked back towards the street of the tanners, to undress and wait for the night to pass; and Willie was locked then in that new chamber of consciousness, of smell and awfulness, but with the conviction that
he would soon be living in it as in a complete world, and would survive.
In the morning he picked his way to the post office. On the old single-page air letter that he had not finished—where he had scratched out Kandapalli’s name and then had been worried about going on—he wrote:
I believe I am among the enemies of the man we talked about. I am not master of my movements. I will be staying here for two weeks. Please write me at the poste restante of this town. This letter will take one week to get to you. Your letter will take a week to get to me. I am depending on you
.
He and Bhoj Narayan went to the bazaar at midday. The food was fresher at midday than in the evening. They ate with relish and then, as they walked about the town, Bhoj Narayan told more of his story. There was no need for Willie to probe.
Bhoj Narayan said, “I thought in my second year at the university I should give up my studies and join the guerrillas. I used to go with some friends to the tank on the edge of the town. I suppose it’s my old background, but I’ve always liked green. Grass and trees. It’s the way the world should be. We used to talk about what we might do. About joining the guerrillas. But we didn’t know how to go about doing anything. I could only think of approaching one of our teachers. He said he didn’t know how to put me in touch with the guerrillas. But he did. A man from the engineering department of the town came to see me at the students’ hostel one day. He gave me a date when he would be coming to take me to see the people I wanted to see. I promised to come with my friends. But the friends didn’t turn up when the time came. They were too frightened. They were too
worldly. They loved life too much. So I went on my own. That was how it began. That was three years ago.”
“So it’s worked out for you?”
“It’s worked out. I’ve lost a couple of friends. It took me six months to get used to it. I also miss the jokes. In the movement you can’t make jokes. And you can’t make jokes with the peasants. They absolutely don’t like it. Sometimes I feel they will kill you if they think you are teasing them. You have always to say literally what you mean. If you are used to the other way of talking, it’s not always easy.”
S
O THE DAYS
passed, ten rupees a day; and with the companionship of Bhoj it was not disagreeable. But as their money dwindled, and no replacement money came, and no instructions, Willie began to be anxious.
Bhoj Narayan said, “We must ration our money now. We have thirty rupees left. We must spend five rupees a day on food. When we start doing that, ten rupees a day will seem like luxury. It will be good discipline.”
“Do you think they have forgotten us?”
“They have not forgotten us.”
On the fifteenth day, when they had been living on five rupees a day for three days, Willie went to the post office. A letter from Sarojini was waiting for him in the poste restante. The sight of the German stamp lifted his heart.
Dear Willie, I don’t know how to tell you. I suppose when one is trying to arrange things long distance mistakes in communication can occur. I don’t know whether Joseph is responsible or whether somebody else is responsible. The movement, as
you know, has split, and what has happened is that you are among psychopaths. In every underground movement, and I mean every underground movement, there is an element of criminality. I have seen plenty of them and I know. I should have told you when you were here, but I thought you were an intelligent man and would find out on your own and know how to deal with it when the time came. I don’t have to tell you to be careful. Some of the people around you are what is known in the movement as action men. That means they have killed, and are ready to kill again. They can be boastful and wild. The comfort is that you are all serving the same cause in the end, and the time may come one day when you may be able to cross over and join Kandapalli’s people
.
He crumpled up the letter and threw it, with its precious German stamp, on a pile of wet and rotting garbage outside the bazaar. Inside the bazaar Bhoj Narayan said, “This is our last day with money.”
Willie said, “I feel they have forgotten us.”
“We have to show our resourcefulness. We must start looking for work after we have eaten. There would be part-time work in a place like this.”
“What work can we do?”
“That’s the trouble. We have no skill. But we will find something.”
They ate small portions of rice and dal in leaf plates. When they came out Bhoj said, “Look. Black smoke in the sky a few miles away from here. Chimneys. Sugar factories. It’s the grinding season. Let us have a walk.”
They walked to the edge of the town and then they walked through the semi-countryside to the factory, the chimneys getting taller all the time. Trucks loaded with canes passed them all
the time, and ahead of them were bullock carts also loaded with canes. It was chaos in the factory yard, but they found a man of authority. Bhoj Narayan said, “Leave the talking to me.” And five minutes later he came back and said, “We have a job for a week. From ten at night to three in the morning. We will be picking up wet bagasse after the canes have been crushed. We will be taking the bagasse to a drying area. When the stuff is dry they use it as fuel. But that’s not our problem. Twelve rupees a day, a good deal less than the official minimum wage. You wouldn’t be able to buy a cup of coffee in Berlin. But we are not in Berlin, and in some situations you don’t argue. I told the foreman we were refugees from another country. It was my way of telling him that we weren’t going to make trouble. Now we should walk back to the street of the tanners and rest for the night. It will be a long walk there again and a long walk back in the morning.”
And so for Willie the room in the street of the tanners changed again, and became a place of rest before labour. And became, early next morning, just before six, a place where, having walked back in the darkness and bathed off the sticky, sugary bagasse wet from their bodies at the communal tap (fortunately running at that hour), Willie and Bhoj Narayan fell into deep and exhausted sleep, in a kind of brutish contentment.
Willie woke from time to time to the physical aches of his over-exercised body, and then in his half-slumber he saw again the ghostly half-lit scene in the factory yard with the ragged cricket people, his fellow workers, for whom this nightly labour was not a joke or a little out-of-hours drama, a break in routine, but a matter of life and death, walking to and fro in a kind of slow hellish silhouetted dance to the flat wide concrete drying place with small baskets of wet bagasse on their heads, and then with empty baskets in their hands, with others in the distance
taking the night’s dried bagasse to feed the factory furnace, the flames from the bagasse leaping an extraordinary beautiful turquoise and casting an extra pale green glow on the small dark bodies, shining and wasted: about sixty men in all doing what ten men with wheelbarrows could have done in the same time, and what two simple machines would have done with little fuss.
He woke just before one, reflecting, as he looked at it, that his Rolex watch was like a memory, and a need, of another world. Bhoj Narayan was still sleeping. Willie didn’t wish to disturb him. As soon as he could he went out and made for the town away from the street of the tanners. He had an air-letter form and a Pentel pen. He looked for what was known in small towns like this as a hotel, but was only the roughest kind of café or tea shop. Bhoj Narayan had discouraged this kind of adventure. Willie found his hotel. He asked for coffee and steamed rice-cakes. It came with two kinds of chutney and two kinds of dal, and it seemed like the height of luxury, though a month before, this hotel, where flies, nimbler than the people, swarmed everywhere and fed on everything, would have worried him. The lean waiter, physically just above the cricket class, with thick oily hair, wore a tunic suit in white drill. It was black and dirty wherever it could be dirty, especially around the bulging side pockets, as though that kind of dirt was a mark of service and hard work. Clearly only one clean suit a week was allowed to the waiter, and this day was near the end of the allotted week.
The waiter wiped the marble table dry for Willie, the flies swarming up in irritation, making for Willie’s and the waiter’s hair; and Willie took out his air-letter and wrote.