Raja said to Willie one day, “Have you ever seen the police headquarters? Shall we go, just to have a look?”
“Why not?”
It had never occurred to Willie to go looking for the adversary. He had lived for too long now with his disconnected landscapes, his disconnected duties, with no true idea of the results of his actions. It hadn’t occurred to him that this other, well-mapped view of the area was also open to him, would be as easy as opening a book. And when they were on the main road, heading for the district headquarters, it was for a while like returning to an earlier, whole life.
The landscape acquired a friendlier feel. The neem and flamboyant shade trees beside the road, though for stretches the line of trees was broken, spoke of some old idea of benevolence that was still living on. The road acquired another feel, the feel of the working world, with the pleasures of that world — the truck stops with big painted signs, the cola advertisements, the smoky black kitchens at the back with earthen fireplaces on high platforms, and the brightly painted plastic tables and chairs (everything painted the colour of the cola advertisements) in the dusty yards at the front — so different in mood and promise from the self-sacrificing pleasures Willie had been living with for more than a year. Where there was water there were friendly small fields of paddy, maize, tobacco, cotton, sometimes potatoes, sometimes peppers. The fields of the liberated areas Willie knew had fallen into ruin: the old landlords and feudals had run away years before from the guerrilla chaos, and no secure new order had been established.
It was easy for Willie to return to old ways of feeling, and it was a shock when they came to the district headquarters, to the police area at one end of the little town, in a terrible noise of twenty or thirty taxi-scooters like Raja’s, and in a brown-blue billow of exhaust smoke, to see the stained old sandbags (speaking of sun and rain and sun again) and machine guns and the crumpled, much-used uniforms of the Central Reserve Police Force outside police headquarters, uniforms that spoke of a deadly seriousness: to see this effect of the disconnected things he had been doing, to understand in a new way that lives were at stake. The police parade ground, perhaps also the playing ground, was sandy; the kerbstones of the roads within, the camp roads, were newly whitewashed; the shade trees were big and old: like the rest of that police area, they would have had a history: they probably came from the British time. Raja, shouting above the screech and scrape of scooters, excitedly told Willie where in the main two-storeyed building the police commissioner’s rooms were, where the police guest rooms were, and where elsewhere in the compound, at one side of the parade or playing ground, the police welfare buildings were.
Willie was not excited. He was thinking, with a sinking heart, “When they were telling me about what the guerrillas were doing, I should have asked about the police. I never should have allowed myself to believe that there was only one side in this battle. I don’t know how we make mistakes like that. But we do.”
Not long after this Raja was admitted to a training camp. He stayed for a month, then went back to his scooter work.
It was then that things began to go wrong for him.
Bhoj Narayan said to Willie one day, “It’s terrible to say, but I think we are having trouble with Raja. Both his last deliveries of supplies were captured by the police just where he deposited them.”
Willie said, “It might be an accident. And possibly the people who received them were to blame.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “I have another reading. I feel the police have been bribing his elder brother. Perhaps bribing both brothers. Thirty thousand rupees is a big debt.”
“Let us leave it for the time being. Let us not use him.”
“We’ll do that.”
Two weeks later Bhoj Narayan said, “It’s as I feared. Raja wants to leave the movement. We can’t allow that. He’d have us all picked up. I think we’ll have to go and see him. I have told him we are coming to talk it over. We should aim to get there just when the sun sets. We’ll take another scooter.”
The sky was red and gold. The few big trees about the weavers’ area were black. In a house about a hundred yards away there was a cooking fire. It was the house of a family who made bidi leaf-cigarettes. If they rolled a thousand cigarettes a day they made forty rupees. This meant they made twice as much as a weaver for a day’s work.
Bhoj Narayan said to Raja and his brother, “I think we should go inside the house.”
When they went in the elder brother said, “I asked him to leave. I didn’t want him to get killed. If he gets killed we will have to sell the scooter. We will make a loss on that and we will still have to pay off the debt to the bank. I wouldn’t be able to do it. My children will become paupers.”
The elder brother’s wife, who on the previous occasion had worn her best sari, with the gold fringe, but was now wearing only a peasant woman’s skirt, said, “Maim him, sir. Take away an arm or a leg. He will still be able to sit at a loom and do something. Please don’t kill him. We will become beggars if you do.” She sat on the floor and held Bhoj Narayan’s legs.
Willie thought, “The more she begs and pleads, the angrier he will get. He wants to see the fear in the man’s eyes.”
And when the shot was fired, and Raja’s head became a mess, the elder brother’s eyes popped as he stared at the ground. That was how they left him, the elder brother, staring and pop-eyed next to the home-made looms.
All the way back to their base they were grateful for the stutter of the scooter.
A week later, when they met face-to-face again, Bhoj Narayan said, “Give it six months. In my experience that’s what it takes.”
FOR SOME WEEKS afterwards Willie marvelled at himself. He thought, “When I first met Bhoj Narayan I didn’t like him. I was uneasy with him. And then somehow when we were together in the street of the tanners, and I was very low, I found a companionship with him. That companionship was necessary to me. It helped me through a bad patch, when I was sinking into old ways of feeling, old ways of wishing to run away, and that feeling of companionship is now what is uppermost when I think of him. I know that the other Bhoj Narayan, the man I distrusted, is still there, but now I have to look very hard for him. The later man is the man I know and understand. I know how he thinks and why he does what he does. I carry the scene in the house with the looms in my head. I see the scooter in the yard next to the spinning wheel with the old bicycle rim. I see that poor elder brother with the popping eyes, and understand his pain. And yet I do not think I will willingly betray Bhoj Narayan to anyone. I do not think there is any point. I haven’t worked out why I feel there is no point. I could say various things about justice and people on the other side. But it wouldn’t be true. The fact is I have arrived at a new way of feeling. And it is amazing that it should have happened just after fourteen or fifteen months of this strange life. The first night, in the camp in the teak forest, I was disturbed by the faces of the new recruits. Later I was disturbed by the faces at the meetings in the safe houses. I feel I understand them all now.”
THEY WENT ON with the slow, careful labour of taking supplies to where a new front was to be opened, working like ants digging out a nest in the ground or taking leaf fragments to that nest, each worker content and important with his minute task, carrying a speck of earth or a bitten-off scrap of a leaf.