were being assembled for a new front somewhere. After all its recent losses the movement was cautious. It was using many couriers, each courier being used only once or twice a month; and supplies were being sent in small quantities, so that discovery or accident would result only in a small local loss, nothing to alter the larger plan.
Raja said to Willie one day, “Have you ever seen the police headquarters? Shall we go, just to have a look?”
“Why not?”
It had never occurred to Willie to go looking for the adversary. He had lived for too long now with his disconnected landscapes, his disconnected duties, with no true idea of the results of his actions. It hadn’t occurred to him that this other, well-mapped view of the area was also open to him, would be as easy as opening a book. And when they were on the main road, heading for the district headquarters, it was for a while like returning to an earlier, whole life.
The landscape acquired a friendlier feel. The neem and flamboyant shade trees beside the road, though for stretches the line of trees was broken, spoke of some old idea of benevolence that was still living on. The road acquired another feel, the feel of the working world, with the pleasures of that world—the truck stops with big painted signs, the cola advertisements, the smoky black kitchens at the back with earthen fireplaces on high platforms, and the brightly painted plastic tables and chairs (everything painted the colour of the cola advertisements) in the dusty yards at the front—so different in mood and promise from the self-sacrificing pleasures Willie had been living with for more than a year. Where there was water there were friendly small fields of paddy, maize, tobacco, cotton, sometimes potatoes, sometimes peppers. The fields of the liberated areas Willie knew had fallen into ruin: the old landlords and feudals had run away years before from the guerrilla chaos, and no secure new order had been established.
It was easy for Willie to return to old ways of feeling, and it was a shock when they came to the district headquarters, to the police area at one end of the little town, in a terrible noise of twenty or thirty taxi-scooters like Raja’s, and in a brown-blue billow of exhaust smoke, to see the stained old sandbags (speaking of sun and rain and sun again) and machine guns and the crumpled, much-used uniforms of the Central Reserve Police Force outside police headquarters, uniforms that spoke of a deadly seriousness: to see this effect of the disconnected things he had been doing, to understand in a new way that lives were at stake. The police parade ground, perhaps also the playing ground, was sandy; the kerbstones of the roads within, the camp roads, were newly whitewashed; the shade trees were big and old: like the rest of that police area, they would have had a history: they probably came from the British time. Raja, shouting above the screech and scrape of scooters, excitedly told Willie where in the main two-storeyed building the police commissioner’s rooms were, where the police guest rooms were, and where elsewhere in the compound, at one side of the parade or playing ground, the police welfare buildings were.
Willie was not excited. He was thinking, with a sinking heart, “When they were telling me about what the guerrillas were doing, I should have asked about the police. I never should have allowed myself to believe that there was only one side in this battle. I don’t know how we make mistakes like that. But we do.”
Not long after this Raja was admitted to a training camp. He stayed for a month, then went back to his scooter work.
It was then that things began to go wrong for him.
Bhoj Narayan said to Willie one day, “It’s terrible to say, but I think we are having trouble with Raja. Both his last deliveries of supplies were captured by the police just where he deposited them.”
Willie said, “It might be an accident. And possibly the people who received them were to blame.”
Bhoj Narayan said, “I have another reading. I feel the police have been bribing his elder brother. Perhaps bribing both brothers. Thirty thousand rupees is a big debt.”
“Let us leave it for the time being. Let us not use him.”
“We’ll do that.”
Two weeks later Bhoj Narayan said, “It’s as I feared. Raja wants to leave the movement. We can’t allow that. He’d have us