Magic Seeds Part 6

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 ba.n.a.l 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. 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 n.o.body, 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 cla.s.s enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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. 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 cla.s.s enemy. Since the feudal people had long ago run away, and there was strictly speaking no cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 rea.s.signed 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 pa.s.sionately 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 a.r.s.e 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 ma.s.s 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."

A little later he thought, "That was my first idea, in the camp in the teak forest. I allowed that idea to be buried. I had to do that, so that I could live with the people I found myself among. Now that idea has resurfaced, to punish me. I have become a maniac myself. I must get away while I still have time to return to myself. I know I have that time."

Later the squad commander said, and he was almost friendly, "Give it six months. In six months you will be all right." He smiled. He was in his forties, the grandson of a peasant, the son of a gentle clerk in government service; a life of bitterness and frustration showed in his face.

HE WOULD WALK to where the road had not been blown up. Just under ten miles. It was a simple village road, two strips of concrete on a red dirt surface. No buses plied on that road, no taxis or scooter-taxis. It was a guerrilla area, a troubled area, and taxis and scooters were nervous of getting too near. So he would have to make himself as inconspicuous as he could (the thin towel-shawl, the long shirt with the big side pockets, and trousers: trousers would work) and walk from there to the nearest bus station or train station. to where the road had not been blown up. Just under ten miles. It was a simple village road, two strips of concrete on a red dirt surface. No buses plied on that road, no taxis or scooter-taxis. It was a guerrilla area, a troubled area, and taxis and scooters were nervous of getting too near. So he would have to make himself as inconspicuous as he could (the thin towel-shawl, the long shirt with the big side pockets, and trousers: trousers would work) and walk from there to the nearest bus station or train station.

But at that point this dream of escape broke down. He was on a police list, and the police would be watchful at bus stations and train stations. It was possible for him, as a member of the movement, to hide when he reached the open, so to speak; the movement had a network. As a man running away from the movement, and hiding from the police, he had no protection. Not on his own. He had no local contacts.

He thought he would wait until the section meeting and open himself to Einstein. It was risky, but there was no one else he felt he could talk to.

All his doubts about Einstein fell away as soon as he talked to him.

Einstein said, "There is a better way. A shorter way. It will take us out to another road. I will be coming with you. I am tired, too. There are two villages on the way. I know the weavers in both villages. They will put us up for the night, and they will arrange for a scooter to take us on our way. Past the state border. They have friends on the other side. Weavers have their networks too. You can see that I have been researching this trip. Be careful of these people here. Play along with them, if you have to. If they think you are deserting, they will kill you."

Willie said, "Weavers. And scooters."

"You are thinking it's like Raja and his brother. Well, it is like that. But that's how things sometimes happen. A lot of weaver people working their way up go into scooters. The banks help them."

Over the days of the meeting they talked of escape.

Einstein said, "You can't just go and surrender to the police. They might shoot you. It's a complicated business. We have to hide. We might have to hide for a long time. We will do it first with some weaver people in the other state, and then we will move on. We have to get some politicians on our side. They would like to claim the credit for getting us to surrender. They would negotiate with the police for us. It might even be the man I planned to kidnap. That's the way the world is. People are now on this side, now on that. You didn't like me when you first saw me. I didn't like you when I first saw you. The world is like that. Close your mind to nothing. There is something else. I don't want to know what you might have done while you were in the movement. From now on, just remember this: you have done nothing. Things happened around you. Other people did things. But you did nothing. That is what you must remember for the rest of your life."

IT TOOK SIX MONTHS. And for periods this undoing of their life in the movement was like a continuation of that life.

On the first night, before they reached the weavers' hut where they were to sleep, they took off their uniforms and buried them, not willing to risk a fire, and not wanting to burn the uniforms in the presence of their weaver hosts. There followed long days of hot, b.u.mpy journeys over different kinds of road in three-wheel scooter-taxis that were low to the ground, the two of them now in one scooter, now (Einstein's idea, for the security) in separate scooters. The taxi-scooter hood was deep but narrow, like a pram's, and the sun always angled in. On busier roads fumes and brown exhaust smoke blew over them from all sides, and their skin, stinging from the sun, smarted and became gritty. They rested at night in weaver communities. The small, two-roomed houses seemed to have been built to shelter the precious looms more than the people. There was really no s.p.a.ce for Willie and Einstein, but s.p.a.ce was found. Each house they came to was like the one they had left, with some local variation: uneven thatch instead of tiles, clay bricks instead of plastered mud and wattle. At last they crossed the state border, and for two or three weeks the weaver network on the other side continued to protect them.

Willie now had a rough idea where they were. He had a strong wish to be in touch with Sarojini. He thought he might write and ask her to send a letter to the poste restante of a city where they were going.

Einstein said no. The police now understood that ruse. Poste restante letters were not common, and the police would be looking for poste restante letters from Germany. Because of the weavers they had had a comparatively easy journey so far, and Willie might think they were overdoing the caution; but Willie had to remember that they were on a shoot-on-sight police list.

They moved to one city, then to another. Einstein was the leader. He was trying now to get someone in public life to talk to the police.

Willie was impressed. He asked, "How do you know all of this?"

Einstein said, "I had it from the old section leader. The man who went out and then killed his wife."

"So he was planning his break-out all the time I knew him?"

"Some of us were like that. And sometimes those are the very people who stay and stay, for ten, twelve years, and become quite soft in the head, unfit for anything else."

For Willie this time of waiting, this moving to new cities, was like the time he had spent in the street of the tanners, when he didn't know what was going to follow.

Einstein said, "We are waiting on the police now. They are going through our case. They want to know what charges have been laid against us before they can accept our surrender. They are having some trouble with you. Someone has informed on you. It's because of your international connections. Do you know a man called Joseph? I don't recall a man called Joseph."

Willie was about to speak.

Einstein said, "Don't tell me anything. I don't want to know. That is our arrangement."

Willie said, "There is actually nothing."

"That is almost the hardest thing to deal with."

"If they don't accept my surrender, what then?"

"You hide, or they kill you or arrest you. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Some time later Einstein announced, "It's all right, for both of us. Your international connections were not so menacing, after all."

Einstein telephoned the police, and the day came when they went to the police headquarters of the town where they were. They went in a taxi and Willie saw a version of what Raja out of his own excitement had shown him in another town a long time ago: an army-style area created in the British time, the now old trees planted at that time, whitewashed four or five feet up from the ground, the white kerbstones of the lanes, the sandy parade ground, the stepped pavilion, the welfare buildings, the two-storey residential quarters.

The superintendent's office was somewhere there, on the lower floor. When they entered the office, the man himself, in civilian clothes, stood up, smiling, to welcome them. The gesture of civility wasn't at all what Willie was expecting.

He thought, "Bhoj Narayan was my friend. My heart went out to Ramachandra. Without Einstein I wouldn't have known how to get here. But the man in front of me in this office is much more my kind of person. My heart and mind reach out at once to him. His face radiates intelligence. I have to make no allowances for him. I feel we are meeting as equals. After my years in the bush-years when in order to survive I made myself believe things I wasn't sure of-I feel this as a blessing."

SEVEN.

Not the Sinners

HE THOUGHT AT the end of that civil session with the superintendent, a man at once educated and physically well exercised, that he was in the clear, and he continued to think so even when he was separated from Einstein and taken to a jail in an outlying area. Perhaps because of the difficulties he and Einstein had had in arranging their surrender, and because Einstein, explaining the delays, had at a certain stage talked of the police having to "go through" their cases, Willie had confused the idea of surrender with the idea of amnesty. He had thought that after he had gone to the police headquarters and surrendered, he would be released. And he continued in that hope even when he was taken to the jail, and checked in, as it might be into a rough country hotel, but by rough country staff in khaki. There was a certain repet.i.tiveness about this checking in. The new arrival felt less and less welcome after each piece of the jail ritual. the end of that civil session with the superintendent, a man at once educated and physically well exercised, that he was in the clear, and he continued to think so even when he was separated from Einstein and taken to a jail in an outlying area. Perhaps because of the difficulties he and Einstein had had in arranging their surrender, and because Einstein, explaining the delays, had at a certain stage talked of the police having to "go through" their cases, Willie had confused the idea of surrender with the idea of amnesty. He had thought that after he had gone to the police headquarters and surrendered, he would be released. And he continued in that hope even when he was taken to the jail, and checked in, as it might be into a rough country hotel, but by rough country staff in khaki. There was a certain repet.i.tiveness about this checking in. The new arrival felt less and less welcome after each piece of the jail ritual.

"All this is unnerving to me, of course," Willie thought, "but it is an everyday business to these jail officers. It would be less disturbing to me if I put myself in their place."

This was what he tried to do, but they didn't appear to notice.

At the end of his checking in he was lodged in a long room, like a barrack room, with many other men. Most of them were villagers, physically small, subdued, but consuming him with their bright black eyes. These men were awaiting trial for various things; that was why they were still in their everyday clothes. Willie did not wish to enter into their griefs. He did not wish to return so soon to that other prison-house of the emotions. He did not want to consider himself one of the men in the long room. And out of his confidence that he was going soon to go away and be free of it all he thought he should write to Sarojini in Berlin-a jaunty, unsuffering letter: the tone was already with him-telling her of all that had happened to him in the years since he had last written.

But writing a letter wasn't something that could be done just like that, even if he had had pen or pencil and paper. He could think of writing that letter only the next day, and then the sheet of writing paper that the jailer brought him, as an immense favour, was like a much handled page of an account book, narrow, narrowly ruled, torn at the left edge along perforations, rubber-stamped in purple with the name of the jail at the top on the left, and with a big, black-stamped number on the right. That sheet of paper-thin, curling back on itself at the unperforated edge-cast him down, turned his mind away from writing.

Over the next two or three days he learned the jail routine. And, having put the idea of imminent release out of his mind, he settled into his new life, as he had settled into the many other lives that had claimed him at various times. The five-thirty wake-up, the standpipes in the yard, the formality of tasteless jail meals, the tedium of outdoor time, the long idle hours on the floor during lock-up time: he sought to adapt to it with an extension of the yoga (as he used to think of it) with which for a long time, since he had come back to India (and perhaps before, perhaps all his life), he had been facing everyday acts and needs that had suddenly become painful or awkward. A yoga consciously practised until the conditions of each new difficult mode of life became familiar, became life itself.

One morning, a few days after he had come in, he was taken to a room at the front of the jail. The superintendent he liked was there. He liked him still, but at the end of the interview, which was about everything and nothing, he began to feel that his case was not as easy as he had believed. Einstein had spoken of some trouble with Willie's "international connections." That could only mean Sarojini and Wolf, and that of course was where his adventure had started. But at the next interview, with the superintendent and a colleague of the superintendent's, nothing was said about that. There was the incident he had had to forget, the incident Einstein (who clearly knew more than he let on) said he didn't want to hear about. There had been witnesses, and they might have gone to the police. But nothing was said about that in the front room of the jail. And it was only during the fourth interview that Willie understood that the superintendent and his colleague were interested in the killing of the three policemen. Willie, when he thought of that, was more concerned with the pathos and heroism of Ramachandra; the policemen, unseen, unknown, had died far away.

In the earlier interviews, when he had been fighting phantoms, he had said more than he knew. He learned now that the superintendent knew the name of everyone in Ramachandra's squad and knew how close Willie had been to Ramachandra. Since the superintendent also knew the police side of the story his idea of what had happened was more complete than Willie's.

Willie floundered. His heart gave way when he found that he was an accessory to the murder of three men and was going to be charged.

He thought, "How unfair it is. Most of my time in the movement, in fact nearly all my time, was spent in idleness. I was horribly bored most of the time. I was going to tell Sarojini in that semi-comic letter that I didn't write how little I had done, how blameless my life as a revolutionary had been, and how idleness had driven me to surrender. But the superintendent has quite another idea of my life as a guerrilla. He takes me twenty times more seriously than I took myself. He wouldn't believe that things merely happened around me. He just counts the dead bodies."

WILLIE HAD LONG ago given up counting the beds he had slept in. The India of his childhood and adolescence; the three worried years in London, a student, as his pa.s.sport said, but really only a drifter, willing himself away from what he had been, not knowing where he might fetch up and what form his life would take; then the eighteen years in Africa, fast and purposeless years, living somebody else's life. He could count all the beds of those years, and the counting would give him a strange satisfaction, would show him that for all his pa.s.sivity his life was amounting to something; something had grown around him. ago given up counting the beds he had slept in. The India of his childhood and adolescence; the three worried years in London, a student, as his pa.s.sport said, but really only a drifter, willing himself away from what he had been, not knowing where he might fetch up and what form his life would take; then the eighteen years in Africa, fast and purposeless years, living somebody else's life. He could count all the beds of those years, and the counting would give him a strange satisfaction, would show him that for all his pa.s.sivity his life was amounting to something; something had grown around him.

But he had been undone by the India of his return. He could see no pattern, no thread. He had returned with an idea of action, of truly placing himself in the world. But he had become a floater, and the world had become more phantasmagoric than it had ever been. That unsettling feeling, of phantasmagoria, had come to him the day when poor Raja, with boyish excitement, had taken him for a ride in his three-wheel scooter, to show him "the enemy": the local police headquarters with its old trees and sandy parade ground, watched over at the gate by heavily armed men of the reserve police force standing behind stained and dirty sandbags that had gone through a monsoon. Willie knew the road and its drab sights. But everything he saw on his excursion that day had a special quality. Everything was fresh and new. It was as though after being a long time below ground he had come up to the open. But he couldn't stay there, couldn't stay with that vision of freshness and newness. He had to go back with Raja and his scooter to the other world.

Phantasmagoria was confusing. He had at some time lost the ability to count the beds he had slept in; there was no longer any point; and he had given up. Now, in this new mode of experience that had befallen him-interviews, appearances in court, and being shifted about from jail to jail: he had had no idea of this other, whole world of prisons and a prison service and criminals-he started again, not going back to the very beginning, but starting with the day of his surrender.

The day came when he thought he should write to Sarojini. The jaunty mood had long ago left him; when at last he lay face down on the coa.r.s.e, brightly coloured jail rug on the floor and began writing on the narrow ruled paper he was surprised by grief. He thought of his first night in the camp in the teak forest; all night the forest was full of the flappings and cries of birds and other creatures calling for help that wouldn't come. The writing posture was awkward, and the narrow lines, when he tried to write between them, seemed to cramp his hand. In the end he thought he shouldn't extend his obedience to the ruled lines. He let his writing spread over two lines. He needed more paper and he found that there was no trouble about that, once it was signed for. He had thought that a letter from jail could be on only one sheet; he hadn't asked; he a.s.sumed that in jail the world had shrunk in every way.

a.s.suming that they made no trouble in the jail about his letter, it should get to Sarojini in Berlin in a week, a.s.suming her address hadn't changed. a.s.suming that she replied right away, and a.s.suming that the people in the jail made no trouble about it, her reply would get to him in a week. Two weeks, then.