here, but I thought you were an intelligent man and would find out on your own and know how to deal with it when the time came. I don’t have to tell you to be careful. Some of the people around you are what is known in the movement as action men. That means they have killed, and are ready to kill again. They can be boastful and wild. The comfort is that you are all serving the same cause in the end, and the time may come one day when you may be able to cross over and join Kandapalli’s people.
He crumpled up the letter and threw it, with its precious German stamp, on a pile of wet and rotting garbage outside the bazaar. Inside the bazaar Bhoj Narayan said, “This is our last day with money.”
Willie said, “I feel they have forgotten us.”
“We have to show our resourcefulness. We must start looking for work after we have eaten. There would be part-time work in a place like this.”
“What work can we do?”
“That’s the trouble. We have no skill. But we will find something.”
They ate small portions of rice and dal in leaf plates. When they came out Bhoj said, “Look. Black smoke in the sky a few miles away from here. Chimneys. Sugar factories. It’s the grinding season. Let us have a walk.”
They walked to the edge of the town and then they walked through the semi-countryside to the factory, the chimneys getting taller all the time. Trucks loaded with canes passed them all the time, and ahead of them were bullock carts also loaded with canes. It was chaos in the factory yard, but they found a man of authority. Bhoj Narayan said, “Leave the talking to me.” And five minutes later he came back and said, “We have a job for a week. From ten at night to three in the morning. We will be picking up wet bagasse after the canes have been crushed. We will be taking the bagasse to a drying area. When the stuff is dry they use it as fuel. But that’s not our problem. Twelve rupees a day, a good deal less than the official minimum wage. You wouldn’t be able to buy a cup of coffee in Berlin. But we are not in Berlin, and in some situations you don’t argue. I told the foreman we were refugees from another country. It was my way of telling him that we weren’t going to make trouble. Now we should walk back to the street of the tanners and rest for the night. It will be a long walk there again and a long walk back in the morning.”
And so for Willie the room in the street of the tanners changed again, and became a place of rest before labour. And became, early next morning, just before six, a place where, having walked back in the darkness and bathed off the sticky, sugary bagasse wet from their bodies at the communal tap (fortunately running at that hour), Willie and Bhoj Narayan fell into deep and exhausted sleep, in a kind of brutish contentment.
Willie woke from time to time to the physical aches of his over-exercised body, and then in his half-slumber he saw again the ghostly half-lit scene in the factory yard with the ragged cricket people, his fellow workers, for whom this nightly labour was not a joke or a little out-of-hours drama, a break in routine, but a matter of life and death, walking to and fro in a kind of slow hellish silhouetted dance to the flat wide concrete drying place with small baskets of wet bagasse on their heads, and then with empty baskets in their hands, with others in the distance taking the night’s dried bagasse to feed the factory furnace, the flames from the bagasse leaping an extraordinary beautiful turquoise and casting an extra pale green glow on the small dark bodies, shining and wasted: about sixty men in all doing what ten men with wheelbarrows could have done in the same time, and what two simple machines would have done with little fuss.
He woke just before one, reflecting, as he looked at it, that his Rolex watch was like a memory, and a need, of another world. Bhoj Narayan was still sleeping. Willie didn’t wish to disturb him. As soon as he could he went out and made for the town away from the street of the tanners. He had an air-letter form and