Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul Page A

mocking the way an employer or factory foreman might have spoken, or whether he was being serious and encouraging, and meant that this hard labour of theirs in the bagasse yard was serving the cause and for that reason was to be cherished.
    When Willie woke up the next day Bhoj Narayan was not in the room, and it occurred to Willie that he had probably gone out to make some roundabout contact with the movement. Bhoj Narayan’s attitude was still that everything was all right, that in due course fresh money and new instructions would come; and Willie no longer raised the matter with him.
    It was one o’clock, no later than Willie had awakened the day before. His body was getting used to the hours; with a mind racing ahead to alarm, he thought that perhaps in two orthree days he would be spending most of the hours of daylight in stupefied sleep, his most alert hours the hours of his bagasse labour.
    He went to the hotel he had used the previous day and ordered coffee and steamed rice-cakes. The routine was comforting. The undersized waiter with his thick oily hair was still in his very dirty white drill uniform. It was perhaps a little dirtier now, or much dirtier; at this stage of grey and black, degrees of dirt were hard to assess.
    Willie thought, “We will be doing the bagasse job for six more days. Perhaps then we’ll be somewhere else. Perhaps I will never see this waiter in a clean uniform. I am sure that is how he sees his uniform: always white and clean and ironed. Perhaps if he sees his uniform as it is he will lose all his style. His life will change.”
    He went afterwards to the post office, and tapped at the poste restante counter, to see whether by some miracle there was another letter from Sarojini. Pigeonholes against the dark wall were full of letters of various sizes. The clerk when he came didn’t bother to look. He said, “Nothing today. Perhaps in three days. That’s when we get the air mail from Europe.”
    He walked in the dingy business area of the little town. Monsoon and sun had mottled the walls and done away with their original colour. Only the signboards, shrill and competing, were new and bright with paint. He passed a branch of the Bank of Baroda. It was very dark inside. The ceiling fans turned slowly, not disturbing the jagged paper piles on desks, and the clerks at the counter were behind a metal grille.
    Willie said, “Would it be possible to change some German marks here?”
    “If you have a passport. Twenty-four rupees to a mark. Wehave a minimum charge of a hundred rupees. You have your passport?”
    “Later. I will come back later.”
    The idea of running away had come to him only the day before when he was writing to Sarojini. And he thought now, “If I change a hundred marks I will get twenty-three hundred rupees after the charges. That will be enough to get me where I am thinking of going. I must guard those marks with my life. Bhoj Narayan must never know.”
    Bhoj Narayan said nothing about what he had done in the morning. But he had begun to worry. And three days later, when only three days of their work in the sugar factory were left to them, he said to Willie, “I feel there has been a calamity of some sort. We have to learn to live with the idea of calamity. I’ve never been let down before. And my feeling is that we should start thinking of making our way back to the camp in the teak forest.”
    Willie thought, “That’s what you will be doing. You will be doing it on your own. I have my own plans. I will get away and make a fresh start. This is a mistake.”
    The waiter was in a clean uniform that day. It altered him. He smiled and was full of welcome. There were the merest smudges on his pockets where for two or three hours he had been dipping his hands to fish out change.
    Willie thought, “I never thought I would see this. It must be a sign.” And when he went to the post office the man said, “Something for you. I told you it was going to come in three