fifty or sixty years. It was terrible to think about.
“I will tell you what it felt like. Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted. You don’t know what to do. The readiest emotion is anger. You start looking for an enemy. And then you very quickly understand that anger, comforting as it is, is useless, that there is nothing or no one to be angry against. You have to find other ways of dealing with your loss. I was in that empty, unhappy mood when I heard of Kandapalli. I don’t actually think I had heard of him before. He proclaimed a new revolution. He said that the talk of the lost generation of brilliant revolutionaries was sentimental rubbish. They were not particularly brilliant or well-educated or revolutionary. If they were they would not have fallen for the foolish Lin-Piao line. No, Kandapalli said, all that had happened was that we had had the good fortune to lose a generation of half-educated, self-centred fools.
“This was wounding for me. Wolf and I had done a lot of work with the revolutionaries. We knew some of them personally. But the brutality of Kandapalli’s words made me think of certain things I had noticed but put to one side. I thought of the man who had come to the hotel to see us. He was absurdly vain. He wanted us to know how well connected he was in the world outside. When we offered him a drink he asked, pointedly, for a treble of imported whisky. In those days imported whisky was three or four times the price of Indian. He was asking for something extremely expensive, and then with something like self-satisfaction he studied our faces to see how we were reacting. I thought he was contemptible, but we of course were trained to control our faces. And of course the treble whisky was too much for him.
“I thought of that and other things, and then, from being wounded by Kandapalli’s words, I was dazzled by the brilliance and simplicity of his analysis. He proclaimed the death of the Lin-Piao line. Instead, he announced the Mass Line. Revolution was to come from below, from the village, from the people. There was to be no place in this movement for middle-class masqueraders. And—would you believe it?—out of the ruins of that earlier, false revolution he has already set going a true revolution. He has liberated large areas. He does not court publicity, unlike the earlier people.
“It was very hard for us to get to meet him. The couriers were suspicious. There was a relay of them. They wanted to have nothing to do with us. In the end we walked for many days in the forest. I thought we were going nowhere. But at last one afternoon, nearly time for us to camp for the night, we came to a small clearing in the forest. The sunlight fell beautifully on a long mud hut with a grass roof. In front there was a half-harvested mustard field. This was Kandapalli’s headquarters. One of them. After all the drama, we found a simple man. He was short and dark. A primary school teacher, without qualifications. A man from Warangal. Nobody in a town would have noticed him. Warangal is one of the hottest places in India, and when he started talking about the poor his eyes filled with tears and he trembled.”
THIS WAS HOW, in the late summer in Berlin, a new kind of emotional life came to Willie.
Sarojini said, “Every morning when you get up you must think not only of yourself but of others. Think of something that’s close to you here. Think of East Berlin, and the overgrown ruins, and the shell marks from 1945 on the walls, and the people today all looking down as they walk. Think of where you’ve been in Africa. You might want to forget poor Ana, but think of the war there. It’s going on now. Think of your house. Try to imagine Kandapalli in the forest. These are all real places with real people.”
Another day she said, “I was awful to you twenty years ago. I rebuked you too much. I was foolish. I knew very little. I had read very little. I just knew our mother’s story and I knew about our mother’s radical uncle. I know now that you were no different from Mahatma Gandhi, and couldn’t help being what you were.”
Willie said, “Oh, goodness. Gandhi—that would never have occurred to