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canvas shoes. Toughen up the soles of your feet.”
    He spent hours walking in the sandy forests of Berlin. He let the paths lead him on. One afternoon he came to a sun-struck clearing, and before he could fully take in where he was he found himself walking between scores of naked, staring men stretched out on the long grass, among the bicycles that had no doubt brought some of them there. The bicycles lay on their sides on the grass, and the twisted postures of men and machines seemed oddly expectant and alike.
    When he told Sarojini of the unnerving little adventure she said, “That’s a homosexual area. It’s well known. You should be careful. Otherwise you’ll be getting into trouble long before you get to Kandapalli.”
    The leaves on some trees were beginning to turn, and day by day the light was taking a yellower tone.
    One day Sarojini said, “At last. Wolf has had a letter from India from a man called Joseph. He’s a university lecturer. You can tell by the name that he’s a Christian. He’s not underground. He’s very much in the open, and he takes care to keep his nose clean. All these movements have people like that. Useful for us, useful for them, useful for the authorities. Joseph will see you, and if he likes you he will pass you on.”
    A ND SO, AFTER more than twenty years, Willie saw India again. He had left India with very little money, the gift of his father; and he was going back with very little money, the gift of his sister.
    India began for him in the airport in Frankfurt, in the little pen where passengers for India were assembled. He studied the Indian passengers there—people he most likely wasn’t going tosee again after a few hours—more fearfully than he had studied the Tamils and other Indians in Berlin. He saw India in everything they wore and did. He was full of his mission, full of the revolution in his soul, and he felt a great distance from them. But detail by detail the India he was observing, in the airport pen, and then in the aircraft, the terrible India of Indian family life—the soft physiques, the way of eating, the ways of speech, the idea of the father, the idea of the mother, the crinkled, much-used plastic shop bags (sometimes with a long irrelevant printed name)—this India began to assault him, began to remind him of things he thought he had forgotten and put aside, things which his idea of his mission had obliterated; and the distance he felt from his fellow passengers diminished. After the long night, he felt something like panic at the thought of the India that was approaching, the India below the colour-destroying glare he could see from his window. He felt, “I thought of the two worlds, and I had a very good idea of the world to which I belonged. But now, really, I wish I could go back a few hours and stand outside the Patrick Hellmann shop in Berlin, or go to the oyster and champagne bar in the KDW.”
    It was early morning when they landed, and he was better able to control his emotions. The light was already stinging, heat was already rising from the tarmac. The small, shabby airport building was full of movement and echoing noise. The Indian passengers from the aeroplane were already different, already at home, already (with briefcases and cardigans and the plastic bags from shops in famous foreign cities) with an authority that separated them from lesser local folk. The black-bladed ceiling fans were busy; the metal rods or shanks that fixed them to the ceiling were furry with oil and sifted dust.
    Willie thought, “It’s an airport. I must think of it like that. I must think of all that that means.”
    The carpentry was not what Willie expected in an airport building. It was not much above the carpentry of the rough beach-side weekend restaurants Willie had known in Africa (where roughness would have been part of the style and atmosphere). The concrete walls were whitewashed in a rough-and-ready way, with paint splashed beyond concrete on glass and