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 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 wish 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 traveled 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 had never occurred to me to ask why my guide had chosen this particular village or how the movement 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 immediately 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 us or for themselves, whether they did it every evening I never thought to ask. All I knew was that I passionately wished to join the movement. The movement at the time, the movement of thirty years ago. That was arranged for me by my guide. It took time. I left the university and went to a small town……”
As soon as I saw the village I saw the house of a big landlord. It was a big house with a neat thatched roof. The poor people didn’t have neat thatched roofs. Their eaves were untrimmed. The big landlord was the man I had to kill. It was quite remarkable, on my very first day seeing the house of the man I had to kill….I wasn’t to kill him myself. I was to get some peasant to do it. That was the ideology of the time, to turn the peasants into rebels, and through them to start the revolution. And would you believe it, just after seeing the house in the darkness I saw a peasant coming back from his work, late for some reason….he invited me to his hut. When we got there he offered me his cowshed. It is the classic story of the revolution…
I talked to my host about his poverty and his debt and the hardness of his life. He seemed surprised. Then invited him to kill his landlord. I was pushing it, don’t you think? My first night and everything. My peasant simply said no. I was actually quite relieved…What my peasant said was that he depended on his landlord for food and money for three months. To kill the landlord, he said, giving me some of his own wisdom in exchange for my theories, would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. His speech was full of sayings like that. I ran away as soon as I could the next morning. It’s a classic revolutionary story…. But I persevered. And here you see me, thirty years later. Still going among the peasants with that philosophy of murder.”
Willie said “How do you spend the day?”
“ I am in somebody’s hut. I have spent the night there. No worries about rent and insurance and utilities. I get up early and go to the fields to do my stuff. I have got used to it now…I go back to the hut, have a little of the peasants’ food. I read for a while: Marx, Trotsky, Mao, Lenin. Afterwards I visit various people in the village, arranging a meeting for some future date… I return. My host comes from the fields. We chat. Actually we don’t. It’s hard to talk. We don’t have anything to say to one another. You can’t make yourself part of the life of the village. After another day or two I am off. I don’t want my host to get tired of me and tip me off to the police. In this way everyday flows past, and everyday is like every other day.
Excerpt: MAGIC SEEDS by V. S. Naipaul 2004
