A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

who becomes the source of his legal trouble. Despite his wariness about the lower classes, he
aligns himself with Marian, who exposes him to her grasping, brassy, violent friends and family.
Moreover, he learns that for Marian, sexuality is a kind of sport and a means of bettering one’s
lot, nothing personal. These setbacks embitter him and his reaction is to blame the very culture
that allowed his earlier success or at least a chauvinistic ideal of that culture. He laments to
Willie that the nicer sides of western civilization, such as the rule of law and compassion, are out
of date in a changing world, that infact they are being used as weapons against that civilization.
Behind his remark is the old elitism embedded in the phrase “White man’s burden”.
In contrast to Roger’s plight is the story of Marcus, which unfolds in the last scene of the
novel. When Willie and Roger were young, Marcus, a young black diplomat from an African
nation, was their friend. During the intervening years he held onto his job through one brutal
dictatorship after another in his home country and became the ambassador to Great Britain.
Finally, Willie has made a discovery about himself. He gets a job as a fact checker for an
architectural Magazine, London, and his work there requires him to attend classes on
architecture. He finds that the subject suits him and, for the first time, gives him as appreciation
of the physical details and cultural continuity of London. Even though he is now past fifty, he
decides to pursue architecture as a career, a calling. He feels that at last, on his own, he has found
something good to tell Sarojini. Poignantly, when he tries, he cannot write a letter about it
because it entails a rejection of her ideal view of the world.
He says,
“ It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.
That’s where the mischief starts.
That’s where everything starts unraveling.
But I can’t write to Sarojini about that.”
At the end of the novel, Willie is his own man for the first time.
Identity crisis is one of the major issues in the current literary sphere. Magic Seeds is a
moving story of a man searching for his life and fearing he has wasted it, and a testing study of
the conflicts between the rich and the poor, and the struggles with in each. It stunningly captures
the present moment that take us into hearts and minds of those who use terrorism as an ideal and
a way of life and who aspire to the frightening power of wealth.
Magic seeds tells a wrenching tale despite Willie’s rescue, for his story is consonant with