Ramachandra, with his bony nervous fingers on his AK-47, had caused them to lie low. Now in every village the depleted squad was beset and provoked by criminals. In one village there was a pale-complexioned man on a horse and with a gun—how could they have ever missed him?—who came to their evening camp and shouted, “You are CIA, CIA. You should be shot.” Keso decided that they shouldn’t respond. It was the best thing to do, but it wasn’t easy. The man on horseback was a village thug, acting up for the village, making a show of the fearlessness which a while before he had preferred to hide.
In some villages there were people who had got it into their heads that the squad were travelling gunmen who could be hired to kill an enemy. The people who wanted someone killed usually didn’t have money, but they thought they could nag or cajole the men into doing what they wanted. Perhaps this was how they lived, begging for favours in everything. This way of life showed in their wild eyes and wasted bodies.
Willie remembered one of the things Ramachandra used to say: “We must give up the idea of remaking everybody. Too many people are too far gone for that. We have to wait for this generation to die out. This generation and the next. We must plan for the generation after that.”
So stage by stage they went back, for Willie the vision of pastoral undoing itself, as if by a kind of magic. Roads that had been made by the squad with the help of villagers had disappeared; water tanks that had been cleared of mud had become clogged again. Family disputes, infinitely petty, about land or bore-wells or inheritances, that had been brought to Ramachandra as squad leader for his adjudication, and appeared to have been set right by him, raged again; at least one murder had occurred.
One day, outside a village, a dark middle-aged man came up to the marching squad. He said to Keso, “How long have you been in the movement?” And it was as if he had spoken merely to let them hear his beautiful educated voice and understand that, in spite of his peasant clothes and the thin towel-scarf over his shoulders, he was a townsman.
Keso said, “Eight years.”
The stranger said, “When I meet people like you—and I do meet people like you from time to time—I can’t help thinking that you are only captains and majors. Beginners, on the first rung of ascension. Don’t mind it. I have been in the movement, in all the movements if you prefer, for thirty years, and I see no reason why I can’t go on for another thirty. If you are on your toes all the time you can’t be caught. That’s why I think of myself as a general. Or, if you think that is too boastful, a brigadier.”
Willie said, “How do you spend your time?”
“Avoiding capture, of course. Apart from that I am intensely bored. But in the middle of this boredom the soul never fails to sit in judgement on the world and never fails to find it worthless. It is not an easy thing to explain to outsiders. But it keeps me going.”
Willie said, “How did you start?”
“In the classical way. I was at the university. I wished to see how the poor lived. There was a certain amount of excited talk about them among the students. A scout for the movement—there were dozens of them around—arranged for me to see the poor. We met at a railway station and travelled through the night in a third-class coach on a very slow train. I was like a tourist, and my guide was like a travel courier. We came at last to our poor village. It was very poor. It never occurred to me to ask why my guide had chosen this particular village or how the movement had found it. There was no sanitation, of course. That seemed a big thing then. And there was very little food. My guide put questions to people and translated their replies for me. One woman said, ‘There has been no fire in my house for three days.’ She meant she hadn’t cooked for three days and she and her family hadn’t eaten for three days. I was immensely excited. At the end of that first evening the villagers sat around a fire in the open and sang songs. Whether they were doing that for