Magic Seeds Read Online Free

Indian way. I didn’t even know about the autobiography. It was Wolf who first asked me whether I had read it. This was when he’d just come to the ashram at home. He was shocked when he found I didn’t know about it. I have read it two or three times now. It’s so easy to read, such a good story, that you read on and on, and then you find you haven’t been paying proper attention to all the profound things he’s been saying.”
    Willie said, “I feel you’ve been lucky in Wolf.”
    “There’s his other family. That’s a great help. I don’t have to be with him all the time. And he’s a good teacher. I suppose that’s one reason why we are still together. I am someone he can teach. He found out fairly soon that I had no feeling for historical time, that I couldn’t tell the difference between a hundred years and a thousand years, or two hundred years or two thousand. I knew our mother and our mother’s uncle and I had some idea of our father’s family. Beyond that everything was a blur, aprimeval ocean, in which figures like Buddha and Akbar and Queen Elizabeth and the Rani of Jhansi and Marie Antoinette and Sherlock Holmes floated about and crisscrossed. Wolf told me that the most important thing about a book was its date. No point in reading a book if you didn’t know its date, didn’t know how far away or how close it was to you. The date of a book fixed it in time, and when you got to know other books and events, the dates began to give you a time scale. I can’t tell you how liberating that has been for me. When I think of our history, I no longer feel I am sinking in a timeless degradation. I see more clearly. I have an idea of the scale and sequence of things.”
    H E FELL INTO old ways. Twenty-five years before, when London had been as formless and bewildering for him as (according to Sarojini) it had been for the mahatma in 1890, Willie had tried to read himself out of his bewilderment, running to the college library to look up the simplest things. So now, to match the breadth of Sarojini’s knowledge, and with the hope of arriving at her serenity, he began to read. He used the British Council library. There one day—he wasn’t looking for it—he found the mahatma’s autobiography, in the English translation by the mahatma’s secretary.
    The sweet, simple narrative swept him along. He wished to go on and on, to swallow the book whole, short chapter after short chapter; but very soon he was nagged by many things, already only half remembered, already without clear sequence, that he had read with speed; and (as Sarojini had said) he had often to go back, to read the easy words more slowly, to take in the extraordinary things the writer had been saying in his very calm way. A book (especially in the beginning) about shame,ignorance, incompetence: a whole chain of memories that would have darkened or twisted another life, memories that Willie himself (or Willie’s poor father, as Willie thought) would have wished to take to the grave, but which the courage of this simple confession, arrived at by heaven knows what painful ways, made harmless, almost part of folk memory, in which every man of the country might see himself.
    Willie thought, “I wish this healing book had come my way twenty-five years ago. I might have become another man. I would have aimed at another life. I wouldn’t have lived that shabby life in Africa among strangers. I would have felt that I wasn’t alone in the world, that a great man had been there before me. Instead, I was reading Hemingway, who was very far away from me, who had nothing to offer me, and doing my bogus stories. What darkness, what self-deception, what waste. But perhaps I wouldn’t have known how to read the book then. Perhaps it would have said nothing to me. Perhaps I needed to live that life, in order to see it more clearly now. Perhaps things happen when they are meant to happen.”
    He said to Sarojini, when they were talking about the book,