Magic Seeds (3 page)

“I will tell you what it felt like. Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted. You don’t know what to do. The readiest emotion is anger. You start looking for an enemy. And then you very quickly understand that anger, comforting as it is, is useless, that there is nothing or no one to be angry against. You have to find other ways of dealing with your loss. I was in that empty, unhappy mood when I heard of Kandapalli. I don’t actually think I had heard of him before. He proclaimed a new revolution. He said that the talk of the lost generation of brilliant revolutionaries was sentimental rubbish. They were not particularly brilliant or well-educated or revolutionary. If they were they would not have fallen for the foolish Lin-Piao line. No, Kandapalli said, all that had happened was that we had had the good fortune to lose a generation of half-educated, self-centred fools.

“This was wounding for me. Wolf and I had done a lot of work with the revolutionaries. We knew some of them personally. But the brutality of Kandapalli’s words made me think of certain things I had noticed but put to one side. I thought of the man who had come to the hotel to see us. He was absurdly vain. He wanted us to know how well connected he was in the world outside. When we offered him a drink he asked, pointedly, for a treble of imported whisky. In those days imported whisky was three or four times the price of Indian. He was asking for something extremely expensive, and then with something like self-satisfaction he studied our faces to see how we were reacting. I
thought he was contemptible, but we of course were trained to control our faces. And of course the treble whisky was too much for him.

“I thought of that and other things, and then, from being wounded by Kandapalli’s words, I was dazzled by the brilliance and simplicity of his analysis. He proclaimed the death of the Lin-Piao line. Instead, he announced the Mass Line. Revolution was to come from below, from the village, from the people. There was to be no place in this movement for middle-class masqueraders. And—would you believe it?—out of the ruins of that earlier, false revolution he has already set going a true revolution. He has liberated large areas. He does not court publicity, unlike the earlier people.

“It was very hard for us to get to meet him. The couriers were suspicious. There was a relay of them. They wanted to have nothing to do with us. In the end we walked for many days in the forest. I thought we were going nowhere. But at last one afternoon, nearly time for us to camp for the night, we came to a small clearing in the forest. The sunlight fell beautifully on a long mud hut with a grass roof. In front there was a half-harvested mustard field. This was Kandapalli’s headquarters. One of them. After all the drama, we found a simple man. He was short and dark. A primary school teacher, without qualifications. A man from Warangal. Nobody in a town would have noticed him. Warangal is one of the hottest places in India, and when he started talking about the poor his eyes filled with tears and he trembled.”

T
HIS WAS HOW
, in the late summer in Berlin, a new kind of emotional life came to Willie.

Sarojini said, “Every morning when you get up you must think
not only of yourself but of others. Think of something that’s close to you here. Think of East Berlin, and the overgrown ruins, and the shell marks from 1945 on the walls, and the people today all looking down as they walk. Think of where you’ve been in Africa. You might want to forget poor Ana, but think of the war there. It’s going on now. Think of your house. Try to imagine Kandapalli in the forest. These are all real places with real people.”

Another day she said, “I was awful to you twenty years ago. I rebuked you too much. I was foolish. I knew very little. I had read very little. I just knew our mother’s story and I knew about our mother’s radical uncle. I know now that you were no different from Mahatma Gandhi, and couldn’t help being what you were.”

Willie said, “Oh, goodness. Gandhi—that would never have occurred to me. He’s too far away from me.”

“I thought it would surprise you. But it’s true. When he was eighteen or nineteen Gandhi came to England to study law. In London he was like a sleepwalker. He had no means of understanding the great city. He hardly knew what he was looking at. He had no idea of the architecture or the museums, no idea of the great writers and politicians who were hidden in the city of the 1890s. I don’t think he went to a play. All he could think of was his law studies and his vegetarian food and cutting his own hair. Just as Vishnu was floating on the primeval ocean of non-being, so Gandhi in London in 1890 was floating on an ocean of not-seeing and not-knowing. At the end of three years of this half-life or quarter-life he became dreadfully depressed. He felt he needed help. There was a Conservative member of parliament who had a reputation of being interested in Indians. This was the only person Gandhi felt he could turn to. He wrote to him and went to see him. He tried to explain his depression, and after
a short while the M.P. said, ‘I know what your problem is. You know nothing about India. You know nothing of the history of India.’ He recommended some imperialist histories. I am not sure that Gandhi read them. He wanted practical help. He didn’t want to be told to read a history book. Don’t you feel you can see yourself a little bit in that young Gandhi?”

Willie said, “How do you know this about Gandhi and the M.P.? It was a long time ago. Who told you?”

“He wrote his autobiography in the 1920s. A remarkable book. Very simple, very fast, very honest. A book without boasting. A book so true that every young Indian or old Indian can see himself in its pages. There’s no other book like it in India. It would be a modern Indian epic if people read it. But people don’t. They feel they don’t need to. They feel they know it all. They don’t have to find out. It’s the Indian way. I didn’t even know about the autobiography. It was Wolf who first asked me whether I had read it. This was when he’d just come to the ashram at home. He was shocked when he found I didn’t know about it. I have read it two or three times now. It’s so easy to read, such a good story, that you read on and on, and then you find you haven’t been paying proper attention to all the profound things he’s been saying.”

Willie said, “I feel you’ve been lucky in Wolf.”

“There’s his other family. That’s a great help. I don’t have to be with him all the time. And he’s a good teacher. I suppose that’s one reason why we are still together. I am someone he can teach. He found out fairly soon that I had no feeling for historical time, that I couldn’t tell the difference between a hundred years and a thousand years, or two hundred years or two thousand. I knew our mother and our mother’s uncle and I had some idea of our father’s family. Beyond that everything was a blur, a
primeval ocean, in which figures like Buddha and Akbar and Queen Elizabeth and the Rani of Jhansi and Marie Antoinette and Sherlock Holmes floated about and crisscrossed. Wolf told me that the most important thing about a book was its date. No point in reading a book if you didn’t know its date, didn’t know how far away or how close it was to you. The date of a book fixed it in time, and when you got to know other books and events, the dates began to give you a time scale. I can’t tell you how liberating that has been for me. When I think of our history, I no longer feel I am sinking in a timeless degradation. I see more clearly. I have an idea of the scale and sequence of things.”

H
E FELL INTO
old ways. Twenty-five years before, when London had been as formless and bewildering for him as (according to Sarojini) it had been for the mahatma in 1890, Willie had tried to read himself out of his bewilderment, running to the college library to look up the simplest things. So now, to match the breadth of Sarojini’s knowledge, and with the hope of arriving at her serenity, he began to read. He used the British Council library. There one day—he wasn’t looking for it—he found the mahatma’s autobiography, in the English translation by the mahatma’s secretary.

The sweet, simple narrative swept him along. He wished to go on and on, to swallow the book whole, short chapter after short chapter; but very soon he was nagged by many things, already only half remembered, already without clear sequence, that he had read with speed; and (as Sarojini had said) he had often to go back, to read the easy words more slowly, to take in the extraordinary things the writer had been saying in his very calm way. A book (especially in the beginning) about shame,
ignorance, incompetence: a whole chain of memories that would have darkened or twisted another life, memories that Willie himself (or Willie’s poor father, as Willie thought) would have wished to take to the grave, but which the courage of this simple confession, arrived at by heaven knows what painful ways, made harmless, almost part of folk memory, in which every man of the country might see himself.

Willie thought, “I wish this healing book had come my way twenty-five years ago. I might have become another man. I would have aimed at another life. I wouldn’t have lived that shabby life in Africa among strangers. I would have felt that I wasn’t alone in the world, that a great man had been there before me. Instead, I was reading Hemingway, who was very far away from me, who had nothing to offer me, and doing my bogus stories. What darkness, what self-deception, what waste. But perhaps I wouldn’t have known how to read the book then. Perhaps it would have said nothing to me. Perhaps I needed to live that life, in order to see it more clearly now. Perhaps things happen when they are meant to happen.”

He said to Sarojini, when they were talking about the book, “This wasn’t the mahatma we heard about at home. We were told he was a scoundrel and an actor, false to his fingertips.”

She said, “For our mother’s uncle he was a caste oppressor. That was all that they passed on to us. It was part of their private caste war, their own revolution. They couldn’t think of anything bigger. No one felt they had to know more about the mahatma.”

Willie said, “If he hadn’t gone to South Africa, if he hadn’t run into that other life, would he have done nothing? Would he have gone on in his old way?”

“It’s more than likely. But read the relevant chapters again.
You will find that everything is fairly laid out, and you will make up your own mind.”

“How South Africa shocked him. You can feel the shame, the bewilderment. He was in no way prepared for it. That terrible incident in the overnight train, and then the indentured Tamil labourer with the bloody head coming to him for justice.”

Sarojini said, “Beaten up by the planter to whom he had been indentured. The transplanted serfs of the empire, with no rights at all. You could have done anything with them. The ancestors of our rose-sellers here in Berlin. They’ve travelled far in a hundred years. They can fight their own war now. That should make you feel good. We can’t put ourselves in Gandhi’s shoes. To be faced with the most casual kind of brutality and to have no power in one’s hands. Most of us would have run away and hidden. Most of the Indians did, and they still do. But Gandhi, with his holy innocence, thought that there was something he could do. That was how he began his political life, with this need to act. ‘What can I do?’ And that was how it was at the very end. Just before independence there were very bad communal riots in Bengal. He went there. Some people strewed broken bottles and glass over where he, the frail old mahatma, the man of peace, was to walk. He was by now swamped by his own religious search, but there was enough of the old lucidity left, and he was often during these days heard to say to himself, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’

“There wasn’t always much he could do. It’s easy to forget that. He wasn’t always the semi-nude mahatma. The semi-religious way he started with in South Africa—the commune, the idea of bread labour, all the mixed ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin—couldn’t do anything in that situation. In his autobiography his account of his twenty years in South Africa is
vivid and full of incident, full of things he is doing. You might think that something big is happening, something that is going to change South Africa, but a lot of the struggle he is describing is personal and religious, and if you step back just a little you will see that the mahatma’s time in South Africa was a complete failure. He was forty-six when he gave up and went back to India. Five years older than you, Willie, and with nothing to show for twenty years of work. In India he was starting from scratch. He would have to think and think, then and later, about how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders. It might seem today that things were already happening, and that as the mahatma all he had to do in 1915 was to let himself be carried to the crest. It wasn’t like that. He made things happen. He created the wave. He was a mixture of thought and intuition. Thought, above all. He was a true revolutionary.”

And Willie said nothing.

She had taken him far away. She had given him the daily mental exercise of thinking himself back into more desperate places of the world he had seen or known. That had already become a habit of his mornings; and now, in an extension of this morning meditation, he found himself reconsidering his life in India and London, reconsidering Africa and his marriage, acknowledging everything in a new way, hiding nothing, submerging all the pathos of his nondescript past in an ennobling new ideal.

For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he had met in London and Africa. Gradually, with this pride,
there came to him an unexpected joy, which was like further reward, the joy of knowing that he rejected everything he saw. Sarojini had told him that the people he saw lived for pleasure alone. They ate and watched television and counted their money; they had been reduced to a terrible simplicity. He saw the unnaturalness of this simplicity; at the same time he felt the excitement of the new movements of his heart and mind; and he felt above everything around him.