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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Magic
Seeds by V.S. Naipaul |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Identity In his latest novel, Magic
Seeds, V.S. Naipaul reprises character Willie Chandran, whom he introduced in Half a
Life. While reading the earlier book may add to an understanding and appreciation
of Willie’s search for identity, Magic
Seeds stands alone. By the end of Half a
Life, Willie had moved from He got to his
base—it had been his and Bhoj Narayan’s,
his commander—late the next afternoon. It was a half-tribal or quarter-tribal village deep in the
forest and so far not touched by police action; it was a place where he might truly rest, if such rest was
possible for him now. He
arrived at what some people still called the hour of cow-dust, the hour when
in the old days a cattle boy (hired for a few cents a day by the village)
drove the village cattle home in a cloud of dust, and the golden light of
early evening turned that sacred dust to soft, billowing gold. There were no
cattle boys now; there were no landowners to hire them. The revolutionaries
had put an end to that kind of feudal village life, though there were still
people who needed to have their cattle looked after, and there were still
little boys who pined to be hired for the long, idle day. But the golden
light at this time of day was still considered special. It lit up the open forest all
around, and for a few minutes made the white mud walls and the thatch of the
village huts and the small scattered fields of mustard and peppers look well
cared for and beautiful: like a village of an old fairy tale, restful and
attractive to come upon, but then full of menace, with dwarves and giants
and tall wild forest growth and men with axes and children being fattened in
cages. This
village was for the time being under the control of the movement. It was one
of a number of headquarters villages and was subject to something like a
military occupation by the guerrillas. They were noticeable in their thin
olive uniforms and peaked caps with a red star: trousers-people, as the tribals respectfully called them, and with guns. Willie
had a room in a commandeered long hut. He had a traditional four-poster
string bed, and he had learned like a villager to store small objects between
the rafters (of trimmed tree branches) and the low thatch. The floor, of
beaten earth, was bound and made smooth with a mixture of mud and cow-dung.
He had got used to it. The hut
for some months had become a kind of home. It was where he returned after his
expeditions; and it was an
important addition to the list he carried in his head of places he had slept
in, and was able to count (as was his habit) when he felt he needed to get
hold of the thread of his life. But now the hut had also become a place
where, without Bhoj Narayan,
he was horribly alone. He was glad to have got there, but then, almost
immediately, he had become restless. The
rule of privacy, of not saying too much about oneself and not inquiring into
people’s circumstances in the world outside, which had been laid down during
his first night in the camp in the teak forest, that rule still held. He
knew only about the man in the room next to his. This man was dark and fierce
and with big eyes. When he was a child or in his teens he had been badly
beaten up by the thugs of some big landlord, and ever since then he had been
in revolutionary movements in the villages. The first of those movements, historically
the most important, had faded away; the second had been crushed; and now,
after some years of hiding, he was on his third. He was in his mid or late
forties, and no other style of life was possible for him. He liked tramping
through villages in his uniform, browbeating villagers, and talking of
revolution; he liked living off the land, and this to some extent meant
living off village people; he liked being important. He was completely
uneducated, and he was a killer. He sang dreadful revolutionary songs
whenever he could; they contained the sum of his political and historical
wisdom. He
told Willie one day, “Some people have been in the movement for thirty years.
Sometimes on a march you may meet one, though they are hard to find. They are
skilled at hiding. But sometimes they like to come out and talk to people
like us and boast.” Willie
thought, “Like you.” And
repeatedly during the evening of his return, hearing the man next door
singing his revolutionary songs again and again (the way some boys at
Willie’s mission school used to sing hymns), Willie thought, “Perhaps some
feeling of purpose will come back to me. Once
or twice during the night he got up and went outside. There were no
outhouses; people just used the forest. There were no lights in the village.
There was no moon. He was aware of the sentries with guns. He gave the
password, and then a little while later he had to give it again, so that as he walked he
felt the strange word “comrade” echoing about him, as question and
reassurance. The forest was black, and full of sound: sudden wing-beating,
amid cries of alarm and pain from birds and other creatures, calling for help
that wouldn’t come. Willie
thought, “The most comforting thing about life is the certainty of death.
There is no way now for me to pick my way back to the upper air. Where was
the upper air? In
the morning someone knocked on the door of Willie’s room and came in before
Willie answered. The man who came in carried an AK-47. He was as pale as
Einstein, but much smaller, about five feet. He was very thin, with a
skeletal but handsome face and bony, nervous hands. Another six or seven
inches would have given him an immense presence. He
said, “My name is Ramachandra. I am a unit
commander. Your unit commander now. You are no longer a courier. We have
received instructions that you are to be admitted into my unit. You have
proved yourself. Today or tomorrow we will be having a section meeting to
discuss the new situation. The meeting will be here or somewhere else. I
don’t know as yet. You must hold yourself ready to start marching this
evening.” He
had small, hard, mad eyes. He fingered his gun with his bony fingers all the
time he spoke. And then, attempting another kind of style, he turned abruptly
and walked out of the room. Like
Einstein, Ramachandra was a man of an upper caste,
perhaps the highest. Such people were having a hard time in the world
outside; populist governments had set up all kinds of barriers against them
since independence; many of them, fearing slow impoverishment at home, were
now migrating to the He
thought, “I thought I had left all of this behind.
But now it’s all here, just as it was, leaping out at me. I have been around
the world, but still it’s here.” There was no night
march through the forest for Willie, to his great relief. The section meeting
was held in the village where he was. They assembled all the next day,
arriving not in various disguises, as they did in the town, but in uniform;
and in a great show of fellowship they ate the simple village food, peppery
lentils and flat bread made of millet. Einstein
came. Willie had been fearing to meet him again, but
now, after Ramachandra, Willie was ready to forgive
the malevolence in his eyes and even ready to think that Einstein had
softened. There
also came the leader of the camp in the teak forest, who all that time before
had sent Willie with Bhoj Narayan
to the street of the tanners. He was smooth and civil, even seductive, with
wonderful manners, speaking softly and yet careful in his intonations, like
an actor. Willie had mentally put him in a grey double-breasted suit and made
him a university teacher or a civil servant in the world outside. Wondering
what had driven a man apparently so complete to the guerrillas and their hard
life in the bush, Willie, following some kind of instinct, had seen him as a
man tormented by the infidelities of his wife. Willie had later thought: “I
wasn’t making it up. I saw that because for some reason he wanted me to see
it. It was the message he was transmitting to me.” Now, meeting the man again
after two years, still seeing the far-off pain in his eyes, Willie thought,
adhering half in a joke to his first assessment, “Poor fellow. With that
awful wife.” And treated him like that right through. The
meeting was in Ramachandra’s hut. It began at about
ten; that was the usual time for these section meetings. There was a pressure
lamp. In the beginning it roared and was dazzling; then it settled down to a
hum, and became duller and duller. Brown jute sacking had been spread on the
earth floor, and over the sacking there were cotton sheets and blankets, with
pillows and bolsters. The
civil man, the leader at the camp in the teak forest, gave the news. It was
very bad. Much more had been lost than the men in the railway colony. They
were only part of one squad, and three full squads had been wiped out by the
police. All the weapons that had been assembled piece by piece over a year
had been lost. That was a loss of many hundreds of thousands of rupees, and
there had been nothing to show for it. The
leader said, “In a war losses have to be digested. But these losses are
exceptional, and we have to rethink our strategy. We have to give up our plan
to take the war to the small towns at the fringe of our liberated areas. It
was perhaps too ambitious at this stage. Though it should be said that in war
ambition sometimes pays off. We will, of course, start up again in those
places, or places like them. But that’s in the future.” Einstein
said, “The poison of Kandapalli’s teaching is
responsible for what has happened. The idea of organising
the people through the people sounds pretty, and people abroad will applaud
it. But we who know the reality know that the peasants have to be disciplined
before they can become foot soldiers of the revolution. You have to rough
them up a little bit.” A
dark man said, “How can you talk like this when you yourself are of a
peasant family?” Einstein
said, “That’s why I talk as I do. I never hide what I come from. There is no
beauty in the peasant. That is Kandapalli’s
teaching. He is a man of a high caste, though he suppresses his caste
suffix. He is wrong because this movement is not a movement of love. No
revolution can be a movement of love. If you ask me, I will tell you that the
peasants ought to be kept in pens.” Somebody
else said, “How can you talk in this cruel way when people like Shivdas serve the movement so loyally?” Einstein
said, “Shivdas is loyal because he needs us. He wants
people in the village to see how close we are to him. He uses our friendship
to terrorise the villagers. Shivdas
is very black and very thin and he gives us his bedroom and he talks
revolution and land redistribution. But he is a crook and a thug. The big
landowners and the old feudal officials have run away. There is no policeman
or surveyor in his village, and every year Shivdas
reaps many acres of other people’s crops and ploughs many acres of other
people’s land, If people didn’t think we were with him they would have killed
him long ago. The day Shivdas thinks it will serve
him better he will betray us to the police. The revolutionary has at all
times to be clear-sighted, and to understand the poor human material he might
have the misfortune to work with. If Commander Bhoj
Narayan hadn’t been led astray by our African
friend we wouldn’t have had the calamity we have come here to discuss.” People
looked at Willie. Ramachandra’s eyes were hard. The
man acting as chairman, the leader of the camp in the teak forest, and
clearly now the section leader, said to Willie, “I think you should have the
opportunity to say something.” Willie
said, “The commander is right. I feel responsible. I feel especially
responsible for what happened to Bhoj Narayan. He was my friend. I wish to say that too.” Einstein
looked appeased. And there was a general relaxation in the meeting.
Self-criticism was part of these meetings. When it came quickly it had a good
effect: it bonded people together. The
leader said, “Chandran has spoken generously. I
think he should be commended for that.” Gradually,
then, through many interruptions, through inquiries about the loss of the
squads and the arms, and the arrest of Bhoj Narayan, and through long discussions about the nature of
the peasantry as compared with the nature of the urban proletariat (a favourite topic), the leader came to the new strategy
that the movement had decided on. The
section leader said, “We will give up taking the war to the small towns, as I
said. Instead, we will push deeper into the forest. Each section will take
over a hundred and fifty villages. We will administer these villages, and we
will announce that we have expanded the liberated areas. This will help with
the loss of morale. It will not be easy. It will be hard, but it is the way
ahead.” The
meeting ended after three hours. Long before then they had said what they
wanted to say. They began to repeat things. They began to say “Personally I
feel” or “I very much feel,” to add passion to what they had said before; it
was a sign they were flagging. The pressure lamp itself gradually dimmed; and
then could not be pumped higher. Afterwards—the
pressure lamp fading fast to its limp brown mantle, the meeting breaking up,
some people hanging around for a few last words, but standing now (in bare
feet or olive socks) on the sheets and sacking and amid the pillows and bolsters
where they had been sitting, others recovering their boots from the many
boots at the doorway, and then picking their way with flashlights to their
huts, the flashlights making the forest bigger and the surrounding night
blacker—afterwards Einstein came to Willie just before he left the hut and
said in a neutral voice, “The weaver-caste man went to the police, didn’t
he?” Willie
said, “It looks like it.” “He paid the price. So I suppose the police
will get Bhoj Narayan
under Section 302. Did people
see?” Willie
said, “The brother.” Einstein’s
eyes became far away. A second or two later he blinked, gave a little nod as
if acknowledging something, and pressed his lips: a man filing away
information. Willie
thought, “I hope I haven’t made another mistake.” While Naipaul’s
politics can be distracting for some readers, Magic
Seeds can be appreciated for the fine prose, and the consistent motif of
looking for one’s place in the world. Steve Hopkins,
May 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Magic
Seeds.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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