On another day Ramachandra asked Willie, “Why did you leave your wife?”
Willie said, “I was in Africa. A Portuguese colony on its last legs. I had been there for eighteen years. My wife was from that colony. I was living in her big house and on her land, twenty times more land than anyone here has. I had no job. I was just her husband. For many years I thought of myself as lucky. Living where I did — very far from home: India was the last place I wanted to be — and in that high colonial style. Because you must understand I was poor, literally without money, and when I met my wife in London, at the end of my useless college course, I had no idea at all what I might do or where I might go. After fifteen or sixteen years in Africa I began to change. I began to feel that I had thrown away my life, that what I had thought of as my luck was no such thing. I began to feel that all I was doing was living my wife’s life. Her house, her land, her friends, nothing that was my own. I began to feel that because of my insecurity — the insecurity I had been born into, like you — I had yielded too often to accidents, and that these accidents had taken me further and further away from myself. When I told my wife I was leaving her because I was tired of living her life, she said something very strange. She said it wasn’t really her life. I have been thinking of that in the past two years, and I believe now that what my wife was saying was that her life was as much a series of accidents as I thought mine was. Africa, the Portuguese colony, her grandfather, her father. At the time I saw it only as a rebuke, and I was in no mood to accept it. I thought she was saying that my life with her had given me strength and spirit and knowledge of the world: these were her gifts to me, and I was now using them to spoil her life. If I had thought she meant what I now believe she did, I would have been very moved, and I might never have left her. That would have been wrong. I had to leave her, to face myself.”
Ramachandra said, “I feel that everything about my birth and life was an accident.”
Willie thought, “That is how it is with all of us. Perhaps men can live more planned lives where they are more masters of their destiny. Perhaps it is like that in the simplified world outside.”
THEY CAME TO a village which was unlike the villages or forest settlements they had been marching through for the past year. This village would have been the seat of a small feudal lord in the old days. A tax-farmer, Ramachandra said: the collector of the forty or fifty kinds of tax these wretched villagers had had to pay in the old days: the virtual owner of twenty or thirty or more villages. The big house, too grand for the setting, was still there on the outskirts of the village. It was empty now, but (out of old respect, perhaps, or fear of malign spirits) no squatters had moved in, and all over the whole spreading complex — the front vestibule, the brick-paved courtyards, the suites of now doorless rooms — there was the damp, dead, tainted smell of the rotting masonry of a long-abandoned mansion. This smell came from bats and their accumulated, cushiony droppings, and from colonising pigeons and wilder birds who had left a crust of white, gritty splashes on the walls, splash upon splash upon splash. It would have been a distasteful labour to clear the house of what bats and birds had left behind, but even then it would have taken a long time, if the house were repeopled, to give it the smell of human life again.
For a long way outside the village the lord’s lands could still be seen: overgrown fields, unirrigated and dried up, untended orchards of lemons and sweet limes with long, straggly branches, acacia and neem growing everywhere.
Ramachandra said, “These villagers can make you want to cry. Most of them don’t have land, and for three years at least we’ve been trying to get them to take over these six hundred acres. We’ve held any number of meetings with them. We’ve told them about the wickedness of the rule of the old days. They agree with all of that, but when we tell them that it is up to them now to take over and plough these acres, they say, ‘It’s not our land.’ We will talk for two hours and they will appear to agree with you, but then at the end they will say again, ‘It’s not our land.’ You can get them to clean out water tanks. You can get them to build roads. But you can’t get them to take over land. I begin to see why revolutions have to turn bloody. These people will begin to understand the revolution only when we start killing people. They will have no trouble understanding that. We have started at least three revolutionary committees in this village and in many of the others. They have all faded away. The young men who join us want blood. They have been to high school. Some even have degrees. They want blood, action. They want the world to change. All we give them is talk. That is Kandapalli’s legacy. They see nothing happening and they drop out. If we were ruling the liberated areas with an iron hand, as we should, we would have all those six hundred acres cleared and ploughed in a month. And people would have had some idea of what the revolution means. We have to do something this time. We’ve heard that the family of the old tax-collector is trying to sell this land. They ran away at the time of the first rebellion and they have been living in some city or other ever since. Living in the old parasitic way, doing nothing. Now they are poor. They want to sell this land in some shady deal to a rich local farmer, a kind of Shivdas figure. He lives about twenty miles away. We are determined to prevent this deal. We want the land to be occupied by the villagers, and it looks as though this time we will have to kill some people. I think we will have to leave some people behind here to enforce our will. This is where Kandapalli has been undermining us. Crying for the poor, hardly able to finish a sentence, impressing everybody, and doing nothing.”
They came to the lord’s house. It was two storeys high and the outer wall was blank. The vestibule went through the lower floor of the house. On either side of the vestibule was a high platform two or three feet wide set into an alcove in the thick wall. Here, in the old days, the doormen would have watched or slept or smoked water pipes and simpler visitors would have waited. This style of house — courtyards alternating with suites of rooms with a central passageway, so that it was possible from the front to see down a tunnel of light and shade right through to the back — this style of house would have been an ancient way of building here. Many farmers had simpler versions of the big house. It spoke of a culture that, in this respect at least, was still itself; and Willie, in the foul smell of the half-rotten big house, found himself moved by this unexpected little vision that had been granted him of his country. The past was terrible; it had to be done away with. But the past also had a kind of wholeness that people like Ramachandra couldn’t begin to care about and couldn’t replace.
It was as Ramachandra had prophesied at the village meeting the next evening. They came respectfully in their short turbans and in their loincloths long or short and in their long shirts, and they listened and looked wise. The uniformed men of the movement let their guns be seen, as Ramachandra had ordered. Ramachandra himself looked impatient and hard and tapped his bony fingers on his AK-47.
“There are five hundred or six hundred acres here. A hundred of you could take over five acres each and start ploughing, start bringing it back to fertility.”
They made a kind of collective sigh, as though that was something they longed for. And yet, when Ramachandra questioned people individually, the reply was only, “The land is not ours.”
He said to Willie afterwards, “You see how fine old manners and fine old ways equip people for slavery. It’s the ancient culture our politicians talk about. But there is something else. I understand these people because I am one of them. I just have to pull a little switch in my head and I know exactly what they are feeling. They accept that some people are rich. They don’t mind that at all. Because these rich people are not like them. The people like them are poor, and they are determined that the poor shall remain poor. When I tell them to take ten acres each, do you know what they are thinking? They are thinking, ‘I don’t want Srinivas to get ten acres of land. It will make him intolerable. Better if I don’t get ten acres if it prevents Srinivas and Raghava from getting ten more acres.’ Only the gun can bring revolution. I am thinking that this time we will have to leave half a squad here to bring them to their senses.”