V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

“You think it will become a hotel?”

“Something like that. Ordinary people can’t live in places like this. You would need a lot of servants. These places were built in the days of many servants. Fifteen gardeners, umpteen chambermaids. Those people don’t exist nowadays. People in service, as they used to say. At one time they were a big part of the population.”

Willie asked, “What happened to them?”

“It’s a wonderful question. I suppose one answer would be that they died out. But that’s not the question you asked. I know what you are asking. If we asked it more often we might begin to understand the kind of country we’re living in. I realise now I haven’t heard anyone ask the question.”

Willie said, “In many parts of India it’s the big issue nowadays. What they call the churning of the castes. I think it’s more important than the religious question. Certain middle groups rising, certain top groups being sucked under. The guerrilla war I went to fight in was a reflection of this movement. A reflection, no more. India will soon be presenting an untouchable face to the world. It won’t be nice. People won’t like it.”

They went down later to drinks and dinner. It was not a formal affair. The banker’s wife was not there. The only other guest was a picture-gallery owner. The banker was a painter, in addition to everything else, and wished to have an exhibition in London. He had told Willie and Roger, when telling them about their fellow dinner guest, “Thought it would be better to ask him down to talk things over. These people like a little style.” Using that last sentence both to flatter Willie and Roger and to rope them into his conspiracy against the gallery man.

He, the gallery man, was dressed as stiffly as Roger. He had big red hands, as though he had been carrying about big framed pictures in his gallery all day.

Spotlights in the ceiling of the very big room played on three of the paintings the banker had done. Willie began to understand what Roger had said about the power of the true egomaniac. It was open to Willie and Roger and the gallery man to say that the paintings the banker had chosen to light up were second-rate work, Sunday painting, no more. It was open to them to be quite brutal. But the man had exposed himself in too innocent a way, and no one wished to wound him.

The gallery owner was suffering. Whatever excitement he might have felt about being a guest in the grand house (and having his elegant clothes unpacked and noted) was going.

The banker said, “Money is of no moment to me. You understand that. I am sure you do.”

And the gallery owner struggled, and failed, to say that he was in the gallery business to make money and the last person he was interested in professionally was a painter who didn’t need money. He spoke two or three disconnected ideas and then gave up.

The subject was then left alone. But enough ego and power had been displayed (the ceiling spotlights continuing to play on the banker’s paintings) for Willie to understand that, after the artistic grand charge, whatever arrangements were going to be made with the gallery man were going to be made privately, without witnesses.

The banker said to Willie, “Do you know the maharaja of Makkhinagar?” He gave Willie no chance to reply. “He came to stay. It was just after Mrs. Gandhi had de-recognised the princes and abolished their privy purses. This would have been in 1971. He was very young, uncertain in London, very much pulled down by the loss of his privy purse. I thought I should do something for him. My father knew his grandfather. Naturally enough, with all the changes in India, the young man was very much standing on his dignity when he came here. No one minded that, but I don’t think he appreciated the people I had brought together for him. Many doors would have been open to him if he wanted, but he didn’t appear interested. They do that, and then they go away and talk about a lack of regard over here. In London I invited him to the Corner Club for lunch. Do you know the Corner? It’s smaller than the Turf Club, and even more exclusive, if such a thing can be imagined. The dining room is very small. The Corner isn’t called the Corner for nothing. Eyebrows were raised when they saw young Makkhinagar, I don’t mind telling you. But I never heard a word from him after that. About fifteen years later I went to Delhi. One of the many occasions when the rumour was that the economy was going to be liberalised. I looked up Makkhinagar in the telephone book. He was a member of the Indian upper house now, and he had a house in Delhi. He invited me over one evening. Such a panoply of security at the house, watchmen and soldiers and sandbags at the gate, and men with guns inside. Makkhinagar was much more relaxed, in spite of it all. He said, ‘Peter, that was an amusing little lunch place we went to the last time.’ That’s what I mean about the Indians. ‘Amusing little lunch place.’ The Corner! You put yourself out, and that’s what you get.”

Willie said nothing. The gallery man gave a little laugh, already like a man pleased to be admitted to this kind of converse about the great; but Roger was silent and looked suffering.

More people were going to come the next day. Willie wasn’t looking forward to it. He wondered why. He thought, “It’s vanity. I can only be easy with people who have some idea of what I am. Or probably it’s just the house. It makes too many demands on people. I am sure it alters them. It has certainly altered the banker. It altered me. It prevented me from seeing things clearly when I arrived.”

In the morning after breakfast (which he went down for) he met the banker’s wife. She greeted him before he greeted her, striding towards him and stretching out her hand as if in the completest welcome, a still-young woman with long bouncing hair and a big bouncing bottom. She gave her name and said, in a fine tinkling voice, “I’m Peter’s wife.” She was narrow-shouldered, narrow-chested, attractive: a very physical person, Willie thought. Nothing about her afterwards was as fine as that first moment. She was only her smile and her voice.

Willie thought, “I must work out why, like the maharaja in the Corner Club, I am not at ease with these people. The maharaja felt the lack of welcome and settled the score fifteen years later. I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel the lack of a welcome. On the contrary, I feel anyone who comes here would be more than ready to meet the banker’s guest. What I feel is that for me there is no point in going through with the occasion. I don’t wish to cultivate anybody or to be cultivated by them. It isn’t that I think they are materialist. No one in the world is more crudely materialist than the Indian well-to-do. But in the forest and in the jail I changed. You can’t go through that kind of life without changing. I have shed my materialist self. I had to, to survive. I feel that these people don’t know the other side of things.” The words came to him just like that. He thought, “The words would have meant something. I must work out what the words mean. The people here don’t understand nullity. The physical nullity of what I saw in the forest. The spiritual nullity that went with that, and was very much like what my poor father lived with all his life. I have felt this nullity in my bones and can go back to it at any time. Unless we understand people’s other side, Indian, Japanese, African, we cannot truly understand them.”

The banker had been talking business with Roger, playing with his golf tee as with a rosary. When they came out from where they had been the banker took Roger and Willie and the gallery man and someone who had just arrived on a little tour of some of his things. He had come back from a world trip visiting business associates and (like a visiting head of state) getting presents from people. Some of these he now displayed. Many of them he mocked. He especially mocked a tall blue semi-transparent porcelain vase, crudely painted with local flowers. The banker said, “It was probably done by the local manager’s wife. Nothing to do in the long nights at those latitudes.” The vase was very narrow at the base, too wide at the top, unsteady, rocking at the touch of a finger. It had already taken a few tumbles and had a long diagonal crack; a piece of the porcelain had broken off.