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.”
SO 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.