V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

He led me to the back of the yard. There was a goat. A white one with big horns, tied to a plum tree. The ground around the tree was filthy. The goat looked sullen and sleepy-eyed, as if a little stunned by the smell it had made. Mr Hinds invited me to stroke the goat. I stroked it. He closed his eyes and went on chewing. When I stopped stroking him, he opened his eyes.

Every afternoon at about five an old man drove a donkey-cart through Miguel Street where we lived. The cart was piled with fresh grass tied into neat little bundles, so neat you felt grass wasn’t a thing that grew but was made in a factory somewhere. That donkey-cart became important to my mother and me. We were buying five, sometimes six bundles a day, and every bundle cost six cents. The goat didn’t change. He still looked sullen and bored. From time to time Mr Hinds asked me with a smile how the goat was getting on, and I said it was getting on fine. But when I asked my mother when we were going to get milk from the goat she told me to stop aggravating her. Then one day she put up a sign:

RAM FOR SERVICE

Apply Within For Terms

and got very angry when I asked her to explain it.

The sign made no difference. We bought the neat bundles of grass, the goat ate, and I saw no milk.

And when I got home one lunch-time I saw no goat.

‘Somebody borrow it,’ my mother said. She looked happy.

‘When it coming back?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

It came back that afternoon. When I turned the corner into Miguel Street I saw it on the pavement outside our house. A man I didn’t know was holding it by a rope and making a big row, gesticulating like anything with his free hand. I knew that sort of man. He wasn’t going to let hold of the rope until he had said his piece. A lot of people were looking on through curtains.

‘But why all-you want to rob poor people so?’ he said, shouting. He turned to his audience behind the curtains. ‘Look, all-you, just look at this goat!’

The goat, limitlessly impassive, chewed slowly, its eyes half-closed.

‘But how all you people so advantageous? My brother stupid and he ain’t know this goat but I know this goat. Everybody in Trinidad who know about goat know this goat, from Icacos to Mayaro to Toco to Chaguaramas,’ he said, naming the four corners of Trinidad. ‘Is the most uselessest goat in the whole world. And you charge my brother for this goat? Look, you better give me back my brother money, you hear.’

My mother looked hurt and upset. She went inside and came out with some dollar notes. The man took them and handed over the goat.

That evening my mother said, ‘Go and tell your Mr Hinds that I don’t want this goat here.’

Mr Hinds didn’t look surprised. ‘Don’t want it, eh?’ He thought, and passed a well-trimmed thumb-nail over his moustache. ‘Look, tell you. Going to buy him back. Five dollars.’

I said, ‘He eat more than that in grass alone.’

That didn’t surprise him either. ‘Say six, then.’

I sold. That, I thought, was the end of that.

One Monday afternoon about a month before the end of my last term I announced to my mother, ‘That goat raffling again.’

She became alarmed.

At tea on Friday I said casually, ‘I win the goat.’

She was expecting it. Before the sun set a man had brought the goat away from Mr Hinds, given my mother some money and taken the goat away.

I hoped Mr Hinds would never ask about the goat. He did, though. Not the next week, but the week after that, just before school broke up.

I didn’t know what to say.

But a boy called Knolly, a fast bowler and a favourite victim of Mr Hinds, answered for me. ‘What goat?’ he whispered loudly. ‘That goat kill and eat long time.’

Mr Hinds was suddenly furious. ‘Is true, Vidiadhar?’

I didn’t nod or say anything. The bell rang and saved me.

At lunch I told my mother, ‘I don’t want to go back to that school.’

She said, ‘You must be brave.’

I didn’t like the argument, but went.

We had Geography the first period.

‘Naipaul,’ Mr Hinds said right away, forgetting my first name, ‘define a peninsula.’

‘Peninsula,’ I said, ‘a piece of land entirely surrounded by water.’

‘Good. Come up here.’ He went to the locker and took out the soaked leather strap. Then he fell on me. ‘You sell my goat?’ Cut. ‘You kill my goat?’ Cut. ‘How you so damn ungrateful?’ Cut, cut, cut. ‘Is the last time you win anything I raffle.’

It was the last day I went to that school.

1957

THOUGH IT IS CHRISTMAS Eve my mind is not on Christmas. I look forward instead to the day after Boxing Day, for on that day the inspectors from the Audit Department in Port-of-Spain will be coming down to the village where the new school has been built. I await their coming with calm. There is still time, of course, to do all that is necessary. But I shall not do it, though my family, from whom the spirit of Christmas has, alas, also fled, have been begging me to lay aside my scruples, my new-found faith, and to rescue us all from disgrace and ruin. It is in my power to do so, but there comes a time in every man’s life when he has to take a stand. This time, I must confess, has come very late for me.

It seems that everything has come late to me. I continued a Hindu, though of that religion I saw and knew little save meaningless and shameful rites, until I was nearly eighteen. Why I so continued I cannot explain. Perhaps it was the inertia with which that religion deadens its devotees. It did not, after all, require much intelligence to see that Hinduism, with its animistic rites, its idolatry, its emphasis on mango leaf, banana leaf and — the truth is the truth — cowdung, was a religion little fitted for the modern world. I had only to contrast the position of the Hindus with that of the Christians. I had only to consider the differing standards of dress, houses, food. Such differences have today more or less disappeared, and the younger generation will scarcely understand what I mean. I might even be reproached with laying too great a stress on the superficial. What can I say? Will I be believed if I say that to me the superficial has always symbolized the profound? But it is enough, I feel, to state that at eighteen my eyes were opened. I did not have to be ‘converted’ by the Presbyterians of the Canadian Mission. I had only to look at the work they were doing among the backward Hindus and Moslems of my district. I had only to look at their schools, to look at the houses of the converted.

My Presbyterianism, then, though late in coming, affected me deeply. I was interested in teaching — there was no other thing a man of my limited means and limited education could do — and my Presbyterianism was a distinct advantage. It gave me a grace in the eyes of my superiors. It also enabled me to be a good teacher, for between what I taught and what I felt there was no discordance. How different the position of those who, still unconverted, attempted to teach in Presbyterian schools!

And now that the time for frankness has come I must also remark on the pleasure my new religion gave me. It was a pleasure to hear myself called Randolph, a name of rich historical associations, a name, I feel, thoroughly attuned to the times in which we live and to the society in which I found myself, and to forget that once — I still remember it with shame — I answered, with simple instinct, to the name of — Choonilal. That, however, is so much in the past. I have buried it. Yet I remember it now, not only because the time for frankness has come, but because only two weeks ago my son Winston, going through some family papers — clearly the boy had no right to be going through my private papers, but he shares his mother’s curiosity — came upon the name. He teased, indeed reproached me, with it, and in a fit of anger, for which I am now grievously sorry and for which I must make time, while time there still is, to apologize to him, in a fit of anger I gave him a sound thrashing, such as I often gave in my school-teaching days, to those pupils whose persistent shortcomings were matched by the stupidity and backwardness of their parents. Backwardness has always roused me to anger.