V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

The elevator shaft of Joseph’s block, situated between pillars, didn’t come all the way down to ground level. It stopped perhaps three feet short, resting on pounded earth as on some rock formation in a cave; and steps cut into this pounded earth led down from the shaft. It might have been done like that for the style of the thing, or to save money; or someone, the architect, the builder, or the shaft-manufacturer, might simply have mis-measured. But, Willie thought, it is an elevator shaft nonetheless: that is how the people living in this block would see it. They would see themselves living in a new and rich area in a modern concrete block with an elevator.

He thought, “I must remember not to mention it to Joseph. He may be a tough customer, not easy to talk to, but I must not make his block, the place where he lives, a topic of conversation. It’s just the kind of thing that fatigue might make me do. I will have to be careful.”

The elevator had folding metal doors. They were black with grease and were very noisy opening and closing. Willie was used to rough building in his remote corner of Africa (where people in their heart of hearts had always known that one day they would have to pack up and leave); but he had seen nothing so unfinished-looking as what he saw when he got out at Joseph’s floor. The building here seemed to have been abandoned at its first brutal stage, with nothing to soften the raw concrete, which was pegged along the top of the corridor walls with many cables, thick and thin and covered with old dust. And all the time, to the distress of Willie, there came the happy cries of children playing in the warm afternoon dust among the dirt mounds in the yard, and the threatening shouts of women.

Joseph opened the door himself. He was a big man, as his voice and manner had suggested, and he was dressed in white or near-white, wearing something which might have been a tunic suit or pyjamas. He would have been about fifty.

He said to Willie, “Do you like my university quarters?”

Willie didn’t fall into the trap. He said, “It’s for you to tell me.”

They were in the sitting room. Through an open door at one corner Willie could see the kitchen, with a woman sitting on the terrazzo floor and kneading something in a basin. Two other doors led to inner rooms, bedrooms perhaps.

Willie also saw that there was in the sitting room a couch or narrow bed spread with bedclothes. Joseph lay down carefully on the couch, and Willie saw that Joseph was an invalid. Below the couch, and nearly all hidden by the bedclothes, could be seen the handle of a chamber pot, and just below Joseph’s head was a tin cup, made perhaps from a condensed milk tin, with a welded tin handle — his spittoon.

Joseph, perhaps seeing the distress in Willie’s face, stood up again and showed himself to Willie. He said, “It isn’t as bad as it looks. You see, I can stand up and move. But I can only move for about a hundred yards a day. That’s not a lot. So I have to ration myself, even here, in my university quarters. Of course, with a car and a chair it is possible to have something like a normal life. But you have seen our lift. So when I am at home I am most disadvantaged. Every trip to the toilet takes up a precious part of my ration. When that is used up it’s pure pain. Something about my spinal cord. I’ve had the trouble before, and they did something then. Now they tell me that it can be cured, but then I will have no sense of balance. Every day I measure one against the other. When I lie down I’m all right. They tell me that there are some people with this condition who are in pain when they lie down or sit still. They have to keep on the move. I can’t imagine that one.”

Willie’s ache began to come back. But he thought he should explain himself. Joseph made a gesture with both hands that told Willie he was to stop. And Willie stopped.

Joseph said, “How do you think it compares with Africa? Here.”

Willie thought, and couldn’t say. He said, “I always had sympathy for Africans, but I saw them from the outside. I never really found out about them. Most of the time I saw Africa through the eyes of the colonists. They were the people I lived with. And then suddenly that life ended, Africa was all around us, and we all had to run.”

Joseph said, “When I was in England I did a course in Primitive Government for my degree. Just after the war. The time of Kingsley Martin and the New Statesman , people like Joad and Laski. Of course, they wouldn’t call it that now, Primitive Government. I loved it. The Kabakas, the Mugabes, the Omukamas, the various chiefs and kings. I loved the rituals, the religion, the sanctity of the drum. So many things I didn’t know about. Not easy to remember. Like you, my attitude to Africa was the colonial one. But that’s where we all have to begin. It was the colonialists who opened up Africa and told us about it. I thought of it as bush, common ground, open to anyone. It took me some time even to understand that when you entered somebody’s territory in Africa you had to pay your dues, as you would anywhere else. Primitive, they say, but I think that’s where the Africans have the edge on us. They know who they are. We don’t. There’s a lot of talk here about ancient culture and so on, but when you ask them they can’t tell you what it means.”

Willie, heavy with sleep, considered the woman in the kitchen. He saw that she was not sitting flat on the terrazzo floor, as he had thought, but on a narrow and very low bench, perhaps about four inches high. With clothes and flesh she overhung her little bench, almost hiding it. Her head was covered, correctly, because Willie was a visitor; and she was kneading something in a blue-rimmed enamel bowl. But there was something in her back and posture that indicated she was listening to what was being said.

Joseph said, “We are in one of the saddest places in the world here. Twenty times sadder than what you saw in Africa. In Africa the colonial past would have been there for you to see. Here you can’t begin to understand the past, and when you get to know it you wish you didn’t.”

Willie, fighting sleep and the old ache of being awakened too soon, studied the back of the sitting woman and thought, “But this was what Sarojini told me in Berlin. I have heard this before. I used to think that she was trying to motivate me. I respected her for that, but I only half believed the terrible things she was telling me. This must be the way they do it. The cause is good. I believe in it, but I mustn’t let this man agitate me.”

And for a second or two he dozed off.

Joseph must have noticed, because when Willie came to again he thought Joseph, still standing beside his settee, had lost a little of his bounce and earlier style and was trying harder.

Joseph said, “All the land of India is sacred. But here we are on especially sacred ground. We are on the site of the last great Indian kingdom, and it was the site of a catastrophe. Four hundred years ago the Muslim invaders ganged up on it and destroyed it. They spent weeks, possibly months, destroying it. They levelled the capital city. It was a rich and famous city, known to early European travellers. They killed the priests, the philosophers, the artisans, the architects, the scholars. They knew what they were doing. They were cutting off the head. The only people they left behind were the serfs in the villages, and they parcelled them out among themselves. This military defeat was terrible. You cannot understand the degree to which the victors won and the losers lost. Hitler would have called it a war of annihilation, a war without limits and restraints, and this one succeeded to a remarkable degree. There was no resistance. The serfs in the villages policed themselves. They were of various low castes, and there is no caste hatred greater than that of the low for the low, one sub-caste for another. Some ran before and after the horses of their lords. Some did the scavenging. Some did the grave digging. Some offered their women. All of them referred to themselves as slaves. All of them were underfed. That was a matter of policy. It was said that if you fed a slave well he would want to bite you.”