to do.”
“Get some sattoo. It’s a kind of powdered roasted grain. You can buy it in the bazaar. It’s actually like sand when it’s dry. When you are hungry you mix it with a little water. Very little, just enough to soften it. It’s very tasty, and it lasts. It’s what people use when they travel. The other thing you might get is a local towel or shawl. Everyone here has a towel. It’s about four or five feet long, with tasselled ends, and about two feet wide. You wear it around the neck or over a shoulder. The material is very thin and fine. You can dry yourself with it after a bath, and it dries very quickly, in about twenty minutes. I will come for you in seven days. In the meantime I will report that I have found you.”
Willie went to the bazaar to buy sattoo. It wasn’t as easy as he thought. There were different kinds, made from different grains.
Willie, in his new mood, thought, “What ritual, what beauty.”
Seven days later the college boy came back for him. The college boy said, “Those other fellows made me waste a lot of time. They weren’t really interested. They were just talking. One of them was an only son. He had a bigger loyalty to his family. The other one just loved the good life.”
They went in the evening to the railway station, and there they took a passenger train. A passenger train was a slow train, stopping at all the halts. At every halt there was commotion and racket and pushing and shoving and grating voices raised in complaint or protest or just raised for the formality of the thing. At every halt there was dust and the smell of old tobacco and old cloth and old sweat. The schoolboy slept through most of it. Willie thought in the beginning, “I am going to have a shower at the end of this.” Then he thought that he wouldn’t: that wish for hour-to-hour comfort and cleanliness belonged to another kind of life, another way of experiencing. Better to let the dust and dirt and smells settle on him.
They travelled all night, but the passenger train had actually covered very little ground; and then in the bright light of morning the schoolboy left Willie, saying, “Someone will come for you here.”
Behind the screen doors and the thick walls the waiting room was dark. People, wrapped up from head to toe in blankets and dirty grey sheets, were sleeping on benches and the floor. At four o’clock that afternoon Willie’s second courier came, a tall, thin, dark man in a local loincloth of a gingham pattern, and they began walking.
After an hour Willie thought, “I no longer know where I am. I don’t think I will be able to pick my way back. I am in their hands now.”
They were now far from the railway town, far from the town. They were deep in the country, and it was getting dark. They came to a village. Even in the dark Willie could see the trimmed eaves of the thatched roof of the important family of the village. The village was a huddle of houses and huts, back to back and side to side, with narrow angular lanes. They walked past all the good houses and stopped at the edge, at an open thatched hut. The owner was an outcast, and very dark. One of the cricket people Joseph had talked about, created by centuries of slavery and abuse and bad food. Willie did not think him especially friendly. The thatch of his hut was rough, untrimmed. The hut was about ten feet by ten feet. Half of it was living space and washing-up space; the other half, with a kind of loft, was sleeping space, for calves and hens as well as people.
Willie thought, “It’s pure nature now. Everything I have to do I will do in the bush.”
Later they ate a kind of rice gruel, thick and salty.
Willie thought, “They’ve been living like this for centuries. I have been practising my yoga, so to speak, for a few days, and have become obsessed by it. They have been practising a profounder kind of yoga, every day, every meal. That yoga is their life. And of course there would be days when there would be nothing at all to eat, not even this gruel. Please, let me be granted the strength to bear what I am seeing.”
And for the first