Magic Seeds Part 4

Some scrawny boys were playing a rough kind of cricket with a very dirty tennis ball, a bat improvised from the central rib of a coconut branch, and a box for a wicket. Willie saw four or five b.a.l.l.s bowled: there was no style or true knowledge of the game.

Willie caught up with Bhoj Narayan at the house.

Bhoj Narayan said, "There's no one there."

They went around to the back. Bhoj Narayan banged on the flimsy door, which was rotten at the bottom where rain had splashed on it for many seasons. It would have been easy to kick it in. But sharp, acrid voices from three houses at the back called out to them: women and men sitting in the narrow shadow of their houses.

Bhoj Narayan said, "I am looking for my brother-in-law. His father is in hospital."

A wretchedly thin woman in a green sari that showed up all her bones said, "There's no one there. Some people came for him one morning and he went away with them."

Bhoj Narayan asked, "When was that?"

The woman said, "Two weeks ago. Three weeks."

Bhoj Narayan said under his breath to Willie, "I think we should get out of here." To the woman he said, "We have to take the message to other relatives."

They walked back through the parody of the cricket game.

Bhoj Narayan said, "We are still paying for Raja. Everybody he got to know with us is compromised. I let my guard down, I liked him so much. We have to give up this town. We are being watched even as we walk here."

Willie said, "I don't think it was Raja. It might have been Raja's brother, and he didn't really know what he was doing."

"Raja or Raja's brother, we 've taken a bad knock. We 've lost a year's work. Lakhs of rupees in weapons. We were building up a squad here. Heaven knows what has happened in other sectors."

They walked away from the railway colony to the older town.

Willie said, "I would like to go to the post office. There might be a letter from my sister. And since we are not coming back here this might be my last chance for a while to hear from her."

The post office was a small, much-decorated British-built stone building. It had ochre or magnolia walls edged with raised masonry painted red; it had deep, low stone eaves in the Indian style; and a semi-circular stone or masonry panel at the top of the facade gave the date 1928. Obliquely opposite across the thoroughfare was a tea shop.

Willie said, "Let's have a tea or a coffee."

When the coffee came Willie said, "I have to tell you this. I have become nervous of the post office. I came here too often with Raja. You know how he was. Itchy feet. He always wanted to be on the road. I would come here even when I knew that there wouldn't be a letter from my sister. You could say that sometimes I came with Raja only for the company and the ride. The clerk became friendly. It was nice in the beginning, being known. Then it worried me."

Bhoj Narayan said, "I will go for you."

He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down, and made his way across the bright road to the post office doorway, dark below the low stone eaves. He was swallowed up in the gloom and at the same time Willie saw four or five men in varying costumes detaching themselves from the fixed postures in which they had been sitting around the dark mouth of the post office. A second later these men, all together now, were hurrying Bhoj Narayan to what had looked like a taxi but now showed itself to be an unmarked police car.

After the car drove away Willie paid for the coffee and crossed the bright road to the poste restante counter. The clerk was new.

He said to the clerk, "What was all that about?"

The clerk said, with his too-formal English, "Some malefactor. The police were waiting for him for a week."

Willie said, "Can I buy stamps at this counter?"

"You do that at the front."

Willie thought, "I must leave. I must leave fast. I must go to the railway station. I have to go back to the base as fast as I can."

And then, with every new thought that came during his fast walk in the afternoon sun, he understood his predicament more and more clearly. Sarojini's letter would now be in the hands of the police. Perhaps earlier letters as well. Everything was now known about him. He was now on the police list. He no longer had the protection of anonymity. And it was only many minutes later, after he had digested these new facts about himself, that he began to live again those very simple two or three minutes of Bhoj Narayan's walk and capture. It was Bhoj Narayan's boast that he knew how to study a street, to see who didn't belong. The gift had failed him at the end. Or he hadn't thought to use it. Perhaps he hadn't understood the danger. Perhaps he had been too disturbed by what had happened before in the railway colony.

At the railway station he saw from the dust-blown, faded black-and-white boards that the next train going in the direction he wished to go was an express and not a pa.s.senger train. Pa.s.senger trains were slow, stopping at all the stations on the way. The express train would take him many miles beyond where he would normally get off. It would commit him to walking at night through villages and across fields, exciting dogs in villages and birds in open areas, being always at the centre of a great commotion; or he would have to ask at some peasant's or outcast's hut at the edge of a village to be put up for the night, and take his chance in an open shed, with the chickens and the calves.

The express train was due in just over an hour. The idle thought came to him that the Rolex on his wrist would give him away to anyone on the lookout for a fugitive with German connections. Then that simulated anxiety became real, and he began to wonder whether he had been followed from the town, whether some expert police street-watcher hadn't spotted him as an intruder, not a local, in the tea shop opposite the post office.

There was a way at ground level over the tracks to the platform at the other side. This way was busy. There was also an old timber bridge, with a walkway between high half-walls (high, perhaps, to prevent people throwing themselves in front of trains). There were only half a dozen people there. They were young people; they were on the bridge for the adventure and the view. Willie went and stood with them and, knowing that only his head and shoulders showed, tried to become a watcher of crowds. In no time he was fascinated, seeing how unselfconscious people were in their movements, how unique each man's movements were, and how much of the person they revealed.

He saw nothing to worry him, and when the express came in, and the crowd appeared to roar, and the hucksters put an extra edge into their cries that lifted them above the general roar, he ran down and forced himself into a third-cla.s.s compartment that was already quite packed. The open windows had horizontal metal bars; there was fine blown dust everywhere; everything was warm, and everyone smelled of old clothes and tobacco. When the express moved off again into the sunlight he thought, "Luck has been with me. And for the first time here I have been on my own."

Not far from the pa.s.senger-train halt where he would have preferred to get off, the track had a sharp bend. Even express trains slowed down there, and Willie, feeling that luck was now with him, was planning to jump off the express at that point, to save himself a long night's march in unfamiliar territory. That point was about two hours away.

He thought, "I am on my own. Bhoj Narayan is no longer with me. I suppose I will have a rough time with some people now."

He considered the people in his compartment. They would have been like the poor Bhoj Narayan and his family had risen out of in two or three generations. All that work and ambition had now been wasted; all that further possibility had been thrown away. He had told Bhoj Narayan, when they had talked of these things a long time before, and before they had become friends, that Bhoj Narayan's family story was a success story. But Bhoj Narayan had not replied, had not appeared to hear. The same was true, though in a much smaller way, of Raja's upward movement from the weaver caste. That, too, was full of further possibility, and that, too, had come to nothing. What was the point of those lives? What was the point of what could be seen as those two suicides?

Many minutes later, a little nearer the jumping-off point when the track curved, Willie thought, "I am wrong. I am looking at it from my own point of view. Everything was the point for Bhoj Narayan. He felt himself to be a man. That was what the movement and even his suicide-if we think of it like that-gave him."

And then a little later, almost before he jumped, Willie thought, "But that is romantic and wrong. It takes much more to be a man. Bhoj Narayan was choosing a short cut."

The express slowed down, to about ten miles an hour. Willie jumped onto the steep embankment and allowed himself to roll down.

The daylight was going. But Willie knew where he was. He had a walk of three miles or so to a village and a hut, more a farmhouse, whose owner he knew very well. The monsoon was over, but now, as if out of spite, it began to rain. Those three miles took a long time. Still, it could have been worse. If courage had not come to him, and he hadn't jumped off the train at that dangerous steep bend, he would have been taken many extra miles to where the express stopped: a day's journey on foot, at least.

It was just before eight when he came to the village. There were no lights. People went to sleep early here; nights were long. The village street ran along the mud-and-wattle front wall of s.h.i.+vdas's high farmhouse. Willie shook the low door and called. Presently s.h.i.+vdas called back, and soon, wearing almost nothing, a very dark and tall and gaunt man, he opened the low door and let Willie into the kitchen, which was at the front of the house, behind the mud-and-wattle street wall. The thatch was black and grainy from years of cooking smoke.

s.h.i.+vdas said, "I wasn't expecting you."

Willie said, "There's been an emergency. Bhoj Narayan has been arrested."

s.h.i.+vdas took the news calmly. He said, "Come, dry yourself. Some tea? Some rice?"

He called to someone in the next room, and there was movement there. Willie knew what that movement meant: s.h.i.+vdas was asking his wife to give up their bed to the visitor. It was what s.h.i.+vdas did on such occasions. The courtesy came instinctively to him. He and his wife then left the thatched main house and moved to the low, open, tile-covered rooms at the side of the courtyard at the back, where their children slept.

Less than an hour later, lying in s.h.i.+vdas's bed below the high, black, cool thatch, in a warm smell of old clothes and tobacco which was like the smell of the third-cla.s.s railway compartment of just a couple of hours before, Willie thought, "We think, or they think, that s.h.i.+vdas does what he does because he is a peasant revolutionary, someone created by the movement, someone new and very precious. But s.h.i.+vdas does what he does because he is instinctively following old ideas, old ways, old courtesies. One day he will not give up his bed to me. He will not think he needs to. That will be the end of the old world and the end of the revolution."

FIVE.

Deeper in the Forest

HE GOT TO his base-it had been his and Bhoj Narayan's, his commander-late the next afternoon. It was a half-tribal or quarter-tribal village deep in the forest and so far not touched by police action; it was a place where he might truly rest, if such rest was possible for him now. his base-it had been his and Bhoj Narayan's, his commander-late the next afternoon. It was a half-tribal or quarter-tribal village deep in the forest and so far not touched by police action; it was a place where he might truly rest, if such rest was possible for him now.

He arrived at what some people still called the hour of cow-dust, the hour when in the old days a cattle boy (hired for a few cents a day by the village) drove the village cattle home in a cloud of dust, and the golden light of early evening turned that sacred dust to soft, billowing gold. There were no cattle boys now; there were no landowners to hire them. The revolutionaries had put an end to that kind of feudal village life, though there were still people who needed to have their cattle looked after, and there were still little boys who pined to be hired for the long, idle day. But the golden light at this time of day was still considered special. It lit up the open forest all around, and for a few minutes made the white mud walls and the thatch of the village huts and the small scattered fields of mustard and peppers look well cared for and beautiful: like a village of an old fairy tale, restful and attractive to come upon, but then full of menace, with dwarves and giants and tall wild forest growth and men with axes and children being fattened in cages.

This village was for the time being under the control of the movement. It was one of a number of headquarters villages and was subject to something like a military occupation by the guerrillas. They were noticeable in their thin olive uniforms and peaked caps with a red star: trousers-people, as the tribals respectfully called them, and with guns.

Willie had a room in a commandeered long hut. He had a traditional four-poster string bed, and he had learned like a villager to store small objects between the rafters (of trimmed tree branches) and the low thatch. The floor, of beaten earth, was bound and made smooth with a mixture of mud and cow-dung. He had got used to it. The hut for some months had become a kind of home. It was where he returned after his expeditions; and it was an important addition to the list he carried in his head of places he had slept in, and was able to count (as was his habit) when he felt he needed to get hold of the thread of his life. But now the hut had also become a place where, without Bhoj Narayan, he was horribly alone. He was glad to have got there, but then, almost immediately, he had become restless.

The rule of privacy, of not saying too much about oneself and not inquiring into people's circ.u.mstances in the world outside, which had been laid down during his first night in the camp in the teak forest, that rule still held.

He knew only about the man in the room next to his. This man was dark and fierce and with big eyes. When he was a child or in his teens he had been badly beaten up by the thugs of some big landlord, and ever since then he had been in revolutionary movements in the villages. The first of those movements, historically the most important, had faded away; the second had been crushed; and now, after some years of hiding, he was on his third. He was in his mid or late forties, and no other style of life was possible for him. He liked tramping through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely uneducated, and he was a killer. He sang dreadful revolutionary songs whenever he could; they contained the sum of his political and historical wisdom.

He told Willie one day, "Some people have been in the movement for thirty years. Sometimes on a march you may meet one, though they are hard to find. They are skilled at hiding. But sometimes they like to come out and talk to people like us and boast."

Willie thought, "Like you."

And repeatedly during the evening of his return, hearing the man next door singing his revolutionary songs again and again (the way some boys at Willie's mission school used to sing hymns), Willie thought, "Perhaps some feeling of purpose will come back to me."

Once or twice during the night he got up and went outside. There were no outhouses; people just used the forest. There were no lights in the village. There was no moon. He was aware of the sentries with guns. He gave the pa.s.sword, and then a little while later he had to give it again, so that as he walked he felt the strange word "comrade" echoing about him, as question and rea.s.surance. The forest was black, and full of sound: sudden wing-beating, amid cries of alarm and pain from birds and other creatures, calling for help that wouldn't come.

Willie thought, "The most comforting thing about life is the certainty of death. There is no way now for me to pick my way back to the upper air. Where was the upper air? Berlin? Africa? Perhaps there is no upper air. Perhaps that idea has always been a mirage."

In the morning someone knocked on the door of Willie's room and came in before Willie answered. The man who came in carried an AK-47. He was as pale as Einstein, but much smaller, about five feet. He was very thin, with a skeletal but handsome face and bony, nervous hands. Another six or seven inches would have given him an immense presence.

He said, "My name is Ramachandra. I am a unit commander. Your unit commander now. You are no longer a courier. We have received instructions that you are to be admitted into my unit. You have proved yourself. Today or tomorrow we will be having a section meeting to discuss the new situation. The meeting will be here or somewhere else. I don't know as yet. You must hold yourself ready to start marching this evening."

He had small, hard, mad eyes. He fingered his gun with his bony fingers all the time he spoke. And then, attempting another kind of style, he turned abruptly and walked out of the room.

Like Einstein, Ramachandra was a man of an upper caste, perhaps the highest. Such people were having a hard time in the world outside; populist governments had set up all kinds of barriers against them since independence; many of them, fearing slow impoverishment at home, were now migrating to the United States, Australia, Canada, England. Ramachandra and Einstein were doing something else. Within the movement, they were embracing their persecutors. Willie, with his mixed background-his upper-caste father, placid, inactive, with a strain of asceticism, always expecting things to work out; his more fiery mother, many stages down, wis.h.i.+ng to seize the world-Willie understood these men very well.

He thought, "I thought I had left all of this behind. But now it's all here, just as it was, leaping out at me. I have been around the world, but still it's here."

THERE WAS NO night march through the forest for Willie, to his great relief. The section meeting was held in the village where he was. They a.s.sembled all the next day, arriving not in various disguises, as they did in the town, but in uniform; and in a great show of fellows.h.i.+p they ate the simple village food, peppery lentils and flat bread made of millet. night march through the forest for Willie, to his great relief. The section meeting was held in the village where he was. They a.s.sembled all the next day, arriving not in various disguises, as they did in the town, but in uniform; and in a great show of fellows.h.i.+p they ate the simple village food, peppery lentils and flat bread made of millet.

Einstein came. Willie had been fearing to meet him again, but now, after Ramachandra, Willie was ready to forgive the malevolence in his eyes and even ready to think that Einstein had softened.

There also came the leader of the camp in the teak forest, who all that time before had sent Willie with Bhoj Narayan to the street of the tanners. He was smooth and civil, even seductive, with wonderful manners, speaking softly and yet careful in his intonations, like an actor. Willie had mentally put him in a grey double-breasted suit and made him a university teacher or a civil servant in the world outside. Wondering what had driven a man apparently so complete to the guerrillas and their hard life in the bush, Willie, following some kind of instinct, had seen him as a man tormented by the infidelities of his wife. Willie had later thought: "I wasn't making it up. I saw that because for some reason he wanted me to see it. It was the message he was transmitting to me." Now, meeting the man again after two years, still seeing the far-off pain in his eyes, Willie thought, adhering half in a joke to his first a.s.sessment, "Poor fellow. With that awful wife." And treated him like that right through.

The meeting was in Ramachandra's hut. It began at about ten; that was the usual time for these section meetings. There was a pressure lamp. In the beginning it roared and was dazzling; then it settled down to a hum, and became duller and duller. Brown jute sacking had been spread on the earth floor, and over the sacking there were cotton sheets and blankets, with pillows and bolsters.

The civil man, the leader at the camp in the teak forest, gave the news. It was very bad. Much more had been lost than the men in the railway colony. They were only part of one squad, and three full squads had been wiped out by the police. All the weapons that had been a.s.sembled piece by piece over a year had been lost. That was a loss of many hundreds of thousands of rupees, and there had been nothing to show for it.

The leader said, "In a war losses have to be digested. But these losses are exceptional, and we have to rethink our strategy. We have to give up our plan to take the war to the small towns at the fringe of our liberated areas. It was perhaps too ambitious at this stage. Though it should be said that in war ambition sometimes pays off. We will, of course, start up again in those places, or places like them. But that's in the future."

Einstein said, "The poison of Kandapalli's teaching is responsible for what has happened. The idea of organising the people through the people sounds pretty, and people abroad will applaud it. But we who know the reality know that the peasants have to be disciplined before they can become foot soldiers of the revolution. You have to rough them up a little bit."

A dark man said, "How can you talk like this when you yourself are of a peasant family?"

Einstein said, "That's why I talk as I do. I never hide what I come from. There is no beauty in the peasant. That is Kandapalli's teaching. He is a man of a high caste, though he suppresses his caste suffix. He is wrong because this movement is not a movement of love. No revolution can be a movement of love. If you ask me, I will tell you that the peasants ought to be kept in pens."

Somebody else said, "How can you talk in this cruel way when people like s.h.i.+vdas serve the movement so loyally?"

Einstein said, "s.h.i.+vdas is loyal because he needs us. He wants people in the village to see how close we are to him. He uses our friends.h.i.+p to terrorise the villagers. s.h.i.+vdas is very black and very thin and he gives us his bedroom and he talks revolution and land redistribution. But he is a crook and a thug. The big landowners and the old feudal officials have run away. There is no policeman or surveyor in his village, and every year s.h.i.+vdas reaps many acres of other people's crops and ploughs many acres of other people's land. If people didn't think we were with him they would have killed him long ago. The day s.h.i.+vdas thinks it will serve him better he will betray us to the police. The revolutionary has at all times to be clear-sighted, and to understand the poor human material he might have the misfortune to work with. If Commander Bhoj Narayan hadn't been led astray by our African friend we wouldn't have had the calamity we have come here to discuss."

People looked at Willie. Ramachandra's eyes were hard.

The man acting as chairman, the leader of the camp in the teak forest, and clearly now the section leader, said to Willie, "I think you should have the opportunity to say something."

Willie said, "The commander is right. I feel responsible. I feel especially responsible for what happened to Bhoj Narayan. He was my friend. I wish to say that too."

Einstein looked appeased. And there was a general relaxation in the meeting. Self-criticism was part of these meetings. When it came quickly it had a good effect: it bonded people together.

The leader said, "Chandran has spoken generously. I think he should be commended for that."

Gradually, then, through many interruptions, through inquiries about the loss of the squads and the arms, and the arrest of Bhoj Narayan, and through long discussions about the nature of the peasantry as compared with the nature of the urban proletariat (a favourite topic), the leader came to the new strategy that the movement had decided on.

The section leader said, "We will give up taking the war to the small towns, as I said. Instead, we will push deeper into the forest. Each section will take over a hundred and fifty villages. We will administer these villages, and we will announce that we have expanded the liberated areas. This will help with the loss of morale. It will not be easy. It will be hard, but it is the way ahead."

The meeting ended after three hours. Long before then they had said what they wanted to say. They began to repeat things. They began to say "Personally I feel" or "I very much feel," to add pa.s.sion to what they had said before; it was a sign they were flagging. The pressure lamp itself gradually dimmed; and then could not be pumped higher.

Afterwards-the pressure lamp fading fast to its limp brown mantle, the meeting breaking up, some people hanging around for a few last words, but standing now (in bare feet or olive socks) on the sheets and sacking and amid the pillows and bolsters where they had been sitting, others recovering their boots from the many boots at the doorway, and then picking their way with flashlights to their huts, the flashlights making the forest bigger and the surrounding night blacker-afterwards Einstein came to Willie just before he left the hut and said in a neutral voice, "The weaver-caste man went to the police, didn't he?"

Willie said, "It looks like it."

"He paid the price. So I suppose the police will get Bhoj Narayan under Section 302. Did people see?"

Willie said, "The brother."

Einstein's eyes became far away. A second or two later he blinked, gave a little nod as if acknowledging something, and pressed his lips: a man filing away information.

Willie thought, "I hope I haven't made another mistake."

WITHIN A MONTH there began the push deeper into the forest to extend the liberated area. Every squad was given its own route, the list of villages it had to occupy and re-educate. Sometimes two squads might for a stretch follow the same route, and sometimes, exceptionally, two or three squads might camp together for a short time in one of the larger villages. Only people at the top knew how the squads were deployed and what the strategy was; only they knew the extent of the new liberated area. Everybody else took the hard campaign on trust: the long marches in the forest, the poor food and bad water, the days spent among nervous, pa.s.sive villagers and tribal people, who (prepared by a tough "warm-up" group that had been sent on ahead) from time to time were a.s.sembled and made to speak of their "problems," or simply clapped their hands and sang village songs. The squad leader, if he could, might offer a solution to the problems that he had heard about. If he couldn't, he spoke (always in the same simple words and slogans) of the idea and promise of the liberated area; he laid down a few of the new rules, and the people's new loyalties. And then the squad marched on, with a promise to return in some months, to see how people were getting on with their new gift of freedom. there began the push deeper into the forest to extend the liberated area. Every squad was given its own route, the list of villages it had to occupy and re-educate. Sometimes two squads might for a stretch follow the same route, and sometimes, exceptionally, two or three squads might camp together for a short time in one of the larger villages. Only people at the top knew how the squads were deployed and what the strategy was; only they knew the extent of the new liberated area. Everybody else took the hard campaign on trust: the long marches in the forest, the poor food and bad water, the days spent among nervous, pa.s.sive villagers and tribal people, who (prepared by a tough "warm-up" group that had been sent on ahead) from time to time were a.s.sembled and made to speak of their "problems," or simply clapped their hands and sang village songs. The squad leader, if he could, might offer a solution to the problems that he had heard about. If he couldn't, he spoke (always in the same simple words and slogans) of the idea and promise of the liberated area; he laid down a few of the new rules, and the people's new loyalties. And then the squad marched on, with a promise to return in some months, to see how people were getting on with their new gift of freedom.

It was a strange time for Willie, a step down into yet another kind of life: patternless labour, without reward or goal, without solitude or companions.h.i.+p, without news of the outside world, with no prospect of letters from Sarojini, with nothing to anchor himself to. In the beginning he had tried to hold on to his idea of time, his idea of the thread of his life, in his old way, counting the beds he had slept in since he was born (like Robinson Crusoe marking each day with a notch on a piece of wood, as he had thought, going back to one of the books of his mission school). But that counting of beds had become harder and harder with the undifferentiated days of marching, the villages almost all the same. Many months had pa.s.sed since the life of marching and camping had begun; perhaps a year, perhaps more. What had been painful in the beginning, stretching out the days, had become habit. He felt his memory slipping, like time now, and with that slipping of memory the point of the mental exercise disappeared. It became too strenuous, too frustrating; it caused his head to hurt. He gave it up; it was like shedding a piece of himself.

In the squad the nearest thing to companions.h.i.+p was with Ramachandra, the commander. What separated Willie from the rest of the squad was what attracted Ramachandra.

One day they were resting in the forest. A villager and his wife pa.s.sed by, the woman with a bundle on her head. The villager greeted Willie and Ramachandra. Willie called back, "Are you going far?" The man said they were going on a visit to some relations many miles away. Then with a smile he said, "If I had a camera I would give you a good memory of this moment. 'Lost in the woods.'" And he laughed.

Ramachandra was at once on his guard. He asked Willie, "Are they mocking us?"

Willie said, "No, no. He was only being friendly. Though I must say I've never heard a villager making such an elaborate joke. He didn't just say we looked lost, which was all that he meant. He brought in the camera, for the joke. He probably got it from a film."

After the villager and his wife had pa.s.sed Ramachandra said, "They say that your father is a temple priest. An upper-caste man. If that is true, why are you here? Why aren't you in England or the United States? That's where many of my relations are."

Willie outlined his life in England, Africa and Berlin. In the forest the very names were full of dazzle, even when Willie (not wis.h.i.+ng to arouse jealousy and careful not to overdo the personal drama) talked of failure and humiliation and hiding. Ramachandra showed no jealousy. His eyes softened. He wanted to hear more. It was as though Willie, in those far-off places, was experiencing for him as well. And from time to time thereafter, but never too often, and never wis.h.i.+ng to appear too friendly, he sought Willie out to talk of far-off things.

About two weeks later he said, "I was not like you. You are middle cla.s.s. I was a country boy. I was poor. But you must understand. When I was poor and in the country I wasn't thinking all the time that I was poor. That's what a lot of people in the movement don't understand. When I was in the country I used to think that our life was just a regular kind of life. I used to graze cattle with a low-caste boy, a harijan, as people said in those days. Imagine: grazing cattle and not thinking anything of it. The harijan boy used to come home with me sometimes. My father didn't mind. He thought the boy was ambitious and he thought that was what mattered in people. My mother didn't mind either, but she refused point blank to wash any cup or gla.s.s the boy used. So I washed any gla.s.s or cup the boy used. I wonder if the boy knew. You know what happened to him? He was ambitious-my father was right. He is a senior teacher now, that boy, as oily as a paratha and as fat as a barrel. And I am here."