About two weeks later he said, “I was not like you. You are middle class. I was a country boy. I was poor. But you must understand. When I was poor and in the country I wasn’t thinking all the time that I was poor. That’s what a lot of people in the movement don’t understand. When I was in the country I used to think that our life was just a regular kind of life. I used to graze cattle with a low-caste boy, a harijan, as people said in those days. Imagine: grazing cattle and not thinking anything of it. The harijan boy used to come home with me sometimes. My father didn’t mind. He thought the boy was ambitious and he thought that was what mattered in people. My mother didn’t mind either, but she refused point blank to wash any cup or glass the boy used. So I washed any glass or cup the boy used. I wonder if the boy knew. You know what happened to him? He was ambitious — my father was right. He is a senior teacher now, that boy, as oily as a paratha and as fat as a barrel. And I am here.”
Willie, thinking hard, as though there were still any number of traps he had to avoid with Ramachandra, said, “He is where he wants to be. You are where you want to be.”
Ramachandra said, “It was only when I went to the town, to go to a college, that I understood how poor we were. You are used to seeing me in uniform. But when I first went to the town I used to wear a long shirt and pyjama. Our politicians make a point of wearing country clothes, to show how much they care for the common man, but for true country people those clothes can be a cause for shame. When I first went to the town I was ashamed of my clothes all the time. My college friends noticed. They were richer than me. Or let’s say they had a little more money than me. They took me to a tailor and had a suit stitched for me. Two or three days later we went to the shop and they helped me put the suit on. I could hardly believe it when I looked down at myself. All that fine cloth. I wondered whether I would ever have the courage to go out into the street wearing all that cloth. It’s not so easy now to remember those first few moments of wearing a suit — I’ve got so used to it. Then the tailor asked me to look at myself in the long mirror. That was another shock. The country boy had vanished. A city man was looking at me. But then something unexpected happened. I became full of sexual rage. I was a city man. I had a city man’s needs. I wanted a girl. But no girl would look at me.”
Willie considered the pale, pared-down, handsome face set on the thin, small body, still not much more than the body of the small boy grazing cattle in the village. The body seemed to mock the beauty of the face, to render it null; the eyes that could appear so hard were really also full of pain.
Willie said, “All of us from the subcontinent have trouble with sex. We are too used to our parents and families arranging it for us. We can’t do it for ourselves. If I didn’t have that trouble I wouldn’t have married the girl I did. I wouldn’t have gone to Africa and wasted eighteen years of her life and mine. If I had been easier about sex, if I had known how to go out and get it, I would have been another kind of man. My possibilities would have been endless. I can’t even begin to work them out. But without that talent I was doomed. I could get only what I got.” Ramachandra said, “It was better than what I got.” Willie, picking up just a hint of jealousy in Ramachandra’s eyes, thought it better to let the subject drop.
And it was Ramachandra who, in a roundabout way, returned to the topic many days later, when they were on the march.
He said, “What books did you read when you were young?” Willie said, “I had a lot of trouble with the books we were told to read. I tried reading The Vicar of Wakefield. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know who those people were, or why I was reading about them. I couldn’t relate it to anything I knew. Hemingway, Dickens, Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan—I had the same trouble with them and all the others. In the end I had the courage to stop reading them. The only things I understood and liked were fairy stories. Grimm, Hans Andersen. But I didn’t have the courage to tell my teachers or my friends.”
Ramachandra said, “My college teacher asked me one day — I was already a trousers-man, I should tell you—‘Haven’t you read The Three Musketeers?’ When I said no, he said, ‘You’ve missed half your life.’ I looked hard for that book. It wasn’t an easy book to find in our small town. What a let-down it was! I didn’t know where I was or who those people in costume were. And you know what I thought? I thought my teacher — he was an Anglo-Indian — had said that thing about missing half my life because his teacher had said the same thing to him. I felt that thing about the Musketeers had come down the generations, from schoolteacher to schoolteacher, and nobody had told them to stop. Do you know what was easy for me, what I could understand right away and relate to my needs? Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Mao. I had no trouble with them at all. I didn’t find them abstract. I gobbled them up. The only thing I could read apart from that were the Mills and Boon books.”
Willie said, “Love stories for girls.”
“That’s why I read them. I read them for the language, the conversation. I thought they would teach me how to approach girls at the college. I felt that because of my background I didn’t have the correct language. I couldn’t talk about films and music. A certain kind of language leads to a certain kind of talk and then sexual experience — that was what I thought. So after classes I would go home and read my Mills and Boon and learn passages by heart. I would practise this language on the girls in the cafeteria at the college. They would laugh. One girl didn’t laugh. But after a while she got up and went off with the boy she was waiting for. She had been using me as a convenience. I hated that girl especially. I became full of sexual rage, as I told you. I wished I had stayed in my country clothes and never left my village. I wished I had never allowed my friends to put me in a suit. That rage grew and grew. I began to feel I was sitting on a spring. It was that rage that led me to the movement. Somebody from the movement at the college preached hatred of girls. He preached it as a kind of new moralism. He used to say, ‘The first sacrifice is your sexuality, comrade.’ Others said the same thing. I heard them say that the revolutionary was really an ascetic and a saint. The ascetic is very much in our tradition, and I was attracted to it. It is something I preach myself to our squad. I have killed two people who went against the teaching. I killed a man who raped a tribal girl, and I killed a man whom I saw fondling a village boy. I didn’t ask him for any explanations. I stripped that second fellow of all identification and left his body for the villagers to dispose of as they wished.”
Willie noticed how unwilling Ramachandra was in any account of his sexual unhappiness to acknowledge his small size. He talked of everything else: his background, his clothes, his language, the village culture; but he left out what was obvious and most important. It was like the self-criticism sessions they had at formal meetings, where truth was often what was evaded, as Willie himself had evaded the truth when talking about the arrest of Bhoj Narayan and the loss of his squad. Willie admired Ramachandra for not complaining of his size, for the pretence that as a man he was like others, able to talk of more general issues. But no amount of concealment, no amount of sympathy, could do away with Ramachandra’s grief and incompleteness. And often, when he saw the fine-featured man asleep, Willie was full of affection for him.
Willie thought, “When I first saw Bhoj Narayan I saw him as a thug. But then I became friendly with him and lost that vision. When I first saw Ramachandra, handling his gun with his small bony hands, I saw him as a killer and a fanatic. Now already I am losing that vision of him. In this effort of understanding I am losing touch with myself.”