It was in this great stench of the street of the tanners that that evening he and Bhoj Narayan became close. As though it had needed that particular calamity (as it appeared) to bring them together. They went out walking, away from the smoky flambeaux of the tanneries, to the dim fluorescent lights of what to Willie now seemed the purer town, the bazaar (its flies now asleep) and the area around the railway station.
Willie said, “They’ve given us one hundred and fifty rupees for fourteen days. That’s ten rupees a day. In Berlin you wouldn’t be able to buy a cup of coffee with that. Do you think they expect us to spend our own money?”
Bhoj Narayan said, with a touch of sternness, “We should do what they say. They have their reasons.”
And Willie understood that Bhoj Narayan was a true man of the movement, the man in charge of this mission, and had to be heeded.
They went to the bazaar and spent five rupees on dal, cauliflower, and pickles; and another two rupees on coffee. They walked then in the half darkness of the town, talking of their past, each man identifying himself in a way that hadn’t been permitted in the camp. Willie spoke of England and his eighteen years in Africa.
Bhoj Narayan said, “I heard something about that. We must seem like nothing to you.”
Willie said, “It seems more exciting than it was. Words can give wrong ideas. The names of places can give wrong ideas. They have too many grand associations. When you are in the place itself, London, Africa, everything can seem ordinary. At school we learned a little comic poem by William Blake. I don’t think I remember it all. There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he. He ran away to Scotland, The people there to see. There he found that the ground was as hard, And the cherry was as red, As in England. So he stood in his shoes and he wondered. That was me. That was why I came looking for you. I was unhappy where I was. I had a strong idea that my place was in this world here.”
In the darkness as they walked Willie saw the post office. He thought, “I must try to pick my way back here tomorrow.”
Bhoj Narayan said his ancestors had been peasants. They had been driven out of their land and village by a great famine at the end of the nineteenth century. They were a backward caste. They had gone to a new British-built railway town, and there his grandfather had found work of some sort. His father had finished school and found a job in the state transport system. He had then become an accountant. His mother’s family had had the same kind of history. They had a cultured background. They were musicians. But they were of the same backward caste.
Willie said, “You are telling me a success story. Why are you in this movement? Why are you throwing everything away? You are a middle-class man now. Things can only get better for you and your family.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “Why are you in it?”
“A good question.”
Bhoj Narayan said with a little irritation, “But why?”
Willie, backing away from his earlier evasiveness, and the social distance it implied, said, “A long story. I suppose it’s the story of my life. I suppose it’s the way the world is made.”
“Same here. With people of feeling things can never be cut and dried. When you buy a machine you get a book of instructions. Men are not like that. I am proud of my family, proud of what they have done in the last hundred years. But at the same time I’ll tell you. When in the old days I heard about a landlord being killed, my heart sang. I wanted all the feudals to be killed. I wanted them all to be hanged and stay hanging until the flesh fell off their skeletons.”
Willie recognised Joseph’s language.
Bhoj Narayan said, “And I didn’t want others to do the killing. I wanted to be there myself. I wanted to show myself to them before they were killed. I wanted to see the surprise and fright in their eyes.”
Willie thought, “Is this true? Or is he trying to impress me?” He considered the features of the dark man, tried to imagine his family, tried to imagine the powerless past. He said, “I believe the famine that