Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul

true of him. He asked me why I had joined the movement. I couldn’t of course tell him the whole story in two sentences and I said, “Good question.” As though I was in London or Africa or Berlin. He didn’t like that, and I couldn’t laugh it off. I have made a few more stumbles like that with him, and the result is I am afraid to talk freely to him, and he resents this. He is the leader. He has been in the movement for three years. I have to do what I am told, and I feel that in a few weeks I have lost my freedom for no good reason that I can see. I am thinking of running away. I have two hundred marks from the Berlin money. I suppose I can change this at a bank, if they don’t get too suspicious, and then I can go to a railway station, and pick my way back to our family house. But that would be a kind of death for me, too. I don’t want to return to that horrible family unhappiness. I am sorry to be writing like this. I don’t know how long I will be in this town and whether it will be worth your while to write me at the poste restante. I will give you a new address as soon as I can
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    Bhoj Narayan was still in his canvas cot when Willie got back to the street of the tanners. Willie thought, “I am sure he knows where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”
    To avoid questions, he said, “I went to the town and had a coffee and an idli. I needed it.”
    Bhoj Narayan said, “It’s only twelve rupees a night at the sugar factory. Go easy. There might be hard days ahead.”
    Willie, sleepy again after his breakfast, undressed and got into his little cot. The thought of the long day weighed on him, and the thought of the labour of the night.
    He thought, “Is there a point to all of this? There is a point for Bhoj Narayan. He knows what is being planned and how what we are doing here fits in. He has complete faith in it. I don’t have that faith. All I need now is the strength to go on, the strength just for tonight. Let me pray that that strength comes to me from some quarter, some very deep part of my spirit. That is how I must start living now, one day at a time, or one half-day at a time. I have sunk to the depths. I thought this street of the tanners was the limit. But the ghostly bagasse workers have taken me down several notches, and they will be there tonight again, surviving in all their wretchedness. Perhaps I needed to know about these true survivors. Perhaps this exposure to human nullity will do me good, will make me see more clearly.”
    He surrendered to pictures of the turquoise flames on the small bodies of the night workers. The pictures became distorted, lost their sequence, and he fell asleep. The light had almost gone when he awakened. Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and he was thankful for that. He dressed and went to the bazaar and had a little leaf-cup of curried chickpeas. It was like excess, after the morning’s feast. It filled him up, and he was able when he came back to the room to wait patiently until eight,when Bhoj Narayan came back and it was time for them to start walking to the sugar factory.
    And somehow, as if in answer to his need, the strength came to him for the labour of the night. What had been new and debilitating the previous night, in labour and images, was routine on this second night; that helped. After an hour (the Rolex marking off the time, as in his other life or lives) the comforting idea came to him that it was like doing a long and difficult drive in Africa. The thought of it was worrying beforehand, but once you started it became quite all right, quite mechanical: the road itself seemed to take you where you were going. All you had to do was to be calm and allow yourself to go.
    Afterwards they stood in line with the others, sweated, coated with the sticky grey bagasse, wet, to get their twelve rupees.
    Bhoj Narayan said, “Honest labour.”
    Willie didn’t know how to deal with that. He didn’t know whether Bhoj Narayan was speaking ironically,