Magic Seeds Read Online Free Page B

an ennobling new ideal.
    For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he had met in London and Africa. Gradually, with this pride,there came to him an unexpected joy, which was like further reward, the joy of knowing that he rejected everything he saw. Sarojini had told him that the people he saw lived for pleasure alone. They ate and watched television and counted their money; they had been reduced to a terrible simplicity. He saw the unnaturalness of this simplicity; at the same time he felt the excitement of the new movements of his heart and mind; and he felt above everything around him.
    Five months before, in the lovely, shocking, refreshing winter, as a refugee from Africa, with no true place of his own to go back to, it had all seemed welcoming and blessed. The buildings hadn’t changed; the people hadn’t changed—all he could say was that he had learned to spot the harassed, heavy, middle-aged poor women from the east, two frontiers away. He remembered that time, that memory of his own happiness, very clearly. He didn’t reject it. It told him how far he had come.
    That happiness, existing not in the real Berlin but in a special bubble—Sarojini’s apartment, Sarojini’s money, Sarojini’s conversation—couldn’t have endured. Twenty years before he would have wanted to hold on to that good time, would have tried to do, in Berlin, the city at the end of a narrow air corridor, what he had later done in Africa. It would have ended worse than Africa. He might have become like the Indian he met one day, an educated man in his thirties, with gold-rimmed glasses, who had come with high hopes to Berlin and was now a shiny-faced, fawning tramp in ragged clothes, with no place to sleep, his mind no longer whole, his breath very bad, a broken arm in a sling black with grime, complaining of his torments at the hands of young thugs.
    In those five months he had come far. There had never been a time like that for him, when he had been without immediateanxiety, when he had not had to act with anyone, and when as in a fairy story he and his sister had become adults without suffering too much harm. He felt that everything he had thought and worked out in those five months was true. They issued out of a new serenity. Everything he had felt before, all the seemingly real longings that had taken him to Africa, were false. He felt no shame now; he could acknowledge everything; he saw that everything that had happened to him was a preparation for what was now to come.

TWO
Peacocks
    T HEY BEGAN TO WAIT for Kandapalli. But no word came from him. The summer began to fade.
    Sarojini said, “You mustn’t be disheartened. This is just the first of many trials. It happens when you are doing something unusual, and Wolf says it wouldn’t be as easy for you as it would be for a tribal on the spot. They would be worried by exotics like you. We ourselves had a lot of trouble with Kandapalli’s people, and we were only making a film. If you were a tribal you would just have to go to someone in trousers—that’s the way they think of people in authority: trousers-people—and say, ‘Dada, I want to join the movement.’ And the trousers-man would say, ‘What is the name of your village? What is your caste? What is the name of your father?’ All the information needed would be in those simple replies, and it can be easily checked. They would need a little longer to work you out. We told them about our mother’s uncle, and we told them about your African background. We stressed the radical side.”
    Willie said, “I would have liked to start without any stories. I would have liked to be myself. To make a clean start.”
    She seemed not to hear. “You will have to do a lot of walking. You should practise now. Wear