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. We have 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 days.”
Dear Willie, Our father is ill. Neither you nor I have been in touch with him for many years, and I suppose if you asked me I would have said that I was waiting for him to die, so that no one would be able to see what I had come from. I don’t know how you feel, but my shame was very great, and my happiest day was when Wolf came and took me away from that dishonest mess of a family and an ashram. But this news of the illness of the old man makes me think of things from his point of view. I suppose with age one can begin to do things like that. I see how damaged he was, through no fault of his own, and I see how he did the best with what was available to him. We are of another generation and another world. We have another idea of human possibility and we must not judge him too harshly. My heart is telling me that I should go and see him, although I know in my bones that when I get there I will find the same old mess and will be ashamed of them all and pining to leave all over again.
Willie thought, “The waiter’s clean white uniform was a sign. That idea of changing a hundred marks into rupees and making my way back to the ashram was a bad idea. It is cowardly. It is against all my knowledge of the world. I must never think of it again.”
When he went back to the street of the tanners he said to Bhoj Narayan, “You are right. We should start thinking of making our way back to the camp. If there has been a calamity they will need us all the more.”
They were very close then, and that afternoon in the town, and walking to the factory, and during the hours of work, and during the walk back just before dawn. And Willie for the first time felt something like companionship and affection for the dark man.