Willie thought, “It is too late now to worry about Joseph and his vicious son-in-law, filling that flat with tension. No one is more vain and vicious than the low wishing to set the record straight. I was worried about that son-in-law as soon as I saw him, with his twisted self-satisfied smile.”
BHOJ NARAYAN SAID one day, “We have an interesting new recruit. He owns a three-wheeler scooter-taxi. He comes of a simple weaver-caste background, but for some reason — perhaps a teacher, perhaps the example of a friend or distant relation, perhaps some insult — he was granted ambition. That’s the kind of person who’s attracted to us. They’ve begun to move, and they find they want to move faster. In the movement we’ve done research on those people. We’ve studied caste patterns in the villages.”
Willie thought, “You are my friend, Bhoj Narayan. But that’s your story too. That’s why you understand him.” And then a little later, not wishing to betray his friend even in thought, this extra idea came to Willie: “Perhaps it’s my story as well. Perhaps that’s where we all are. Perhaps that’s why we are so hard to manage.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “He sought our people out. He invited them to his house and gave them food. When the police repression was bad he offered his house as a hiding place. I think he might be useful in our courier work. We should go and check him out. His story is like Einstein’s, but without the brilliance. He went to a little town to study, but he didn’t get a degree. The family had to call him back to the village. They couldn’t afford the ten or twelve rupees’ rent for a space in the town, or the twenty or thirty rupees for the boy’s food. It’s pathetic. It makes you want to cry. He suffered when he went back to the village. He had got too used to town life. Do you know what town life was for him? It was going to a little tea shop or hotel and having a coffee and a cigarette in the morning. It was going to a half-rupee seat in a rough little cinema. It was wearing shoes and socks. It was wearing trousers and tucking in his shirt and walking like a man, not flopping about with country slippers and inside a long shirt. When he went back to the family’s weaver-caste house in the village he lost all of that at one blow. He had nothing to do. He wasn’t going to be a weaver. And he was bored out of his mind. You know what he said? ‘In the village it’s pure nature, not even a transistor.’ Just the long, empty days and the longer nights. In the end he got a bank loan and bought a scooter-taxi. At least it got him out of the village. But really it was his boredom that brought him to us. Once you learn about boredom in the village you are ready to be a revolutionary.”
One afternoon a week or so later Willie and Bhoj Narayan went to the scooter-man’s village. This wasn’t a village of uneven thatched roofs and dirt roads, the village of popular imagination. The roads were paved and the roofs were of local red curved tiles. Weavers were a backward caste, and the dalit or backward-caste area of the village began at a bend in the main village lane, but if you didn’t know it was a dalit area you would have missed it. The houses were like those that had gone before. The weavers sat in the late-afternoon shade in the yards in front of their houses and spun yarn into thread. The looms were in the houses; through open front doors people could be seen working them. It was an unhurried scene of some beauty; it was hard to imagine that this spinning and weaving, which looked so much like some precious protected folk craft, was done only for the village, for the very poor, and was a desperate business for the people concerned, run on very narrow margins. The spinning wheels were home-assembled, with old bicycle rims for the main wheels; every other part seemed to be made from twigs and twine and looked frail, ready to snap.
The scooter-man’s scooter was in his front yard, next to a spinning wheel. He lived with his brother and his brother’s family and the house was larger than the average. The two bedrooms were on the left, the rooms with the looms were on the right. The rooms were no more than ten or twelve feet deep, so that you were hardly in the house when you were out of it. At the back of the house on one side was the open kitchen and a large basket with corn cobs, bought for fuel. On the other side was the outhouse. Some richer person’s field came right up to the plot, right up to where the scooter-man’s brother had planted a fine-leaved tree, as yet quite small and slender, which in a couple of seasons would be cut down and used as fuel.
Space: how it always pressed, how in all the openness it always became minute. Willie was unwilling to work out the living arrangements of the house. He imagined there would be some kind of loft in each of the bedrooms. And he understood how, to a young man who had known the comparative freedom of a small town, to be reduced to the small space of this weaver’s house, and to have nothing to do, would be a kind of death.
They brought out low benches for Willie and Bhoj Narayan, and with ancient courtesies, as though they were very rich, they offered tea. Old deprivation showed on the face of the wife of the brother. Her cheeks were sunken and she looked about forty, though she could have been no more than twenty-five or twenty-eight. But Willie at the same time was moved to notice the care with which the brother’s wife had dressed for the occasion, in a new sari of muted colours, grey and black in a small oblong pattern, with a fringe of gold.
The scooter-man was beside himself with pleasure to have Willie and Bhoj Narayan in his house. He spoke a little too freely of his admiration for the movement, and from time to time Willie noticed a kind of disturbance in the brother’s eyes.
Willie thought, “There’s a little trouble here. Perhaps it’s the difference in ages, perhaps it’s the difference in education. One brother has been a trousers-man and has learned boredom. The older brother hasn’t. He or his wife may feel that they are sinking too deep in something they don’t understand.”
Afterwards, when Bhoj Narayan asked Willie, “What do you think?” Willie said, “Raja is all right.” Raja was the name of the scooter-man. “But I am not so sure of the brother or the brother’s wife. They are frightened. They don’t want trouble. They just want to do their weaving work and earn their four hundred rupees a month. How much do you think Raja borrowed from the bank for his scooter?”
“A scooter costs about seventy or seventy-five thousand rupees. That’s new. Raja’s scooter would have cost a good deal less. He’s probably borrowed thirty or forty thousand. The bank wouldn’t have given him more.”
“The elder brother probably thinks about that every night. He probably believes that Raja is over-educated and has got above himself and is heading for a fall.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “They adore Raja. They are very proud of him. They will do what he wants them to do.”
TWO OR THREE times a month they called out Raja to do some work for the movement. He took Willie or Bhoj Narayan or some others to where they had to go in a hurry. And, having this facility now, Willie went often to the post office in small towns, to check his poste restante letters from Germany. They got to know Willie in these post offices; they didn’t always ask him to show his passport. That had seemed to him charming, the Indian friendliness people spoke about; it occurred to him only later to be worried.
And then, after some months, Raja began to ferry supplies, with Willie or Bhoj Narayan, or on his own. There was a space below the passenger seat of the scooter, and it was also easy to fit a false floor. The pick-up and drop-off points always changed; it was understood they were only stages in a kind of relay. Bhoj Narayan acted as a coordinator; he knew a little more than Willie, but even he didn’t know everything. Supplies, mainly weapons, were being assembled for a new front somewhere. After all its recent losses the movement was cautious. It was using many couriers, each courier being used only once or twice a month; and supplies were being sent in small quantities, so that discovery or accident would result only in a small local loss, nothing to alter the larger plan.