V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

There had been the Negro in the hangar or airport shed in Puerto Rico where, after many hours, and in the late afternoon, our little airplane had made its first halt. Already the light had changed; the world had changed. The world had ceased to be colonial, for me; people had already altered their value, even this Negro. He was bound for Harlem. At home, among his fellows, just a few hours before, he was a man to be envied, his journey indescribably glamorous; now he was a Negro, in a straw-colored jacket obviously not his own, too tight across his weight lifter’s shoulder (weight lifting was a craze among us). Now, in that jacket (at home, the badge of the traveler to the temperate north), he was bluffing it out, insisting on his respectability, on not being an American Negro, on not being fazed by the airplane and by the white people.

He was not an educated man, not someone I would have sought out at home. Yet already I had sought him out and even claimed kinship with him. Why? I felt the gestures of friendship to be false even as I made them. In his tight, respectable jacket, he was cool with me; and I was half glad he was, because friendship, chat, with him wasn’t what I wanted. But I had made the gestures. If I had been asked whether I was feeling solitary, vulnerable, I would have said that the opposite was true, that I was in a state of great excitement, that I was loving everything; that everything I had seen so far in the second half of that great day was new and wonderful.

He was cool, the Trinidad man, buttoned up, his eyes quiet, no shine to his color, which had rather a mat or dead quality that spoke of tension. I let him be. I stayed by myself. The light yellowed, darkened. Then we were airborne again.

The little airplane droned on and on. The repetitiveness of this form of travel was an unexpected revelation. So that though the journey was the fastest I had ever made, and though I knew that compared with a ship’s journey it was extraordinarily short, yet it was neither exaggerated nor pretentious to feel that it was “boring.”

There were the woman and her child beside me. The woman was English, as I have said. I had never met an Englishwoman of her age before — had indeed met only one Englishwoman — and had no means of reading her character or intelligence or education. I was not interested in children; was not interested in women with children. Yet towards this woman — much taken up with her child — I found myself making overtures of friendship.

I was carrying some bananas to New York. They were in a paper bag, perhaps on the floor. Some remnant of old peasant travel, with food for the journey; some genuine Hindu distrust of the food that might be offered by the airplane and then by the hotel in New York. The bananas were smelling now; in the warm plane they were ripening by the hour. I offered the woman a banana. Did she take it for her child? I cannot remember. The fact was, I made the offer. Though, really, I didn’t want this woman’s friendship or conversation, and was not interested in the child.

Was there some fear of travel, in spite of my longing for the day, and in spite of my genuine excitement? Was this reaching out to people a response to solitude — since for the first time in my life I was solitary? Was it the fear of New York? Certainly. The city, my behavior there at the moment of arrival, my inability to visualize the physical details of arrival, how and where I was going to spend the night — these were developing anxieties as we flew on and on.

I witnessed this change in my personality; but, not even aware of it as a theme, wrote nothing of it in my diary. So that between the man writing the diary and the traveler there was already a gap, already a gap between the man and the writer.

Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time — and how much writing! — to arrive at that synthesis.

On that day, the first of adventure and freedom and travel and discovery, man and writer were united in their eagerness for experience. But the nature of the experiences of the day encouraged a separation of the two elements in my personality. The writer, or the boy traveling to be a writer, was educated; he had had a formal school education; he had a high idea of the nobility of the calling to which he was traveling to dedicate himself. But the man, of whom the writer was just a part (if a major, impelling part), the man was in the profoundest way — as a social being — untutored.

He was close to the village ways of his Asian-Indian community. He had an instinctive understanding of and sympathy for its rituals, like the farewell at the airport that morning. He was close to the ways of that community, which was separated from peasant India only by two or three generations in a plantation colony of the New World. Yet there was another side to the man: he did not really participate in the life or rituals of that community. It wasn’t only that he was educated in the formal way of a school education; he was also skeptical. Unhappy in his extended family, he was distrustful of larger, communal groupings.

But that half-Indian world, that world removed in time and space from India, and mysterious to the man, its language not even half understood, its religion and religious rites not grasped, that half-Indian world was the social world the man knew. It was all that he had outside school and the life of the imagination fed by books and the cinema. That village world had given him its prejudices and passions; he was interested in, had been passionate about, the politics of India before and after independence. Yet he knew little about his community in Trinidad; he thought that because he belonged to it he understood it; he thought that the life of the community was like an extension of the life of his family. And he knew nothing of other communities. He had only the prejudices of his time, in that colonial, racially mixed setting. He was profoundly ignorant. He hadn’t been to a restaurant, hated the idea of eating food from foreign hands. Yet at the same time he had dreamed of fulfillment in a foreign country.

He looked for adventure. On this first day he found it. But he also came face to face with his ignorance. This ignorance undermined, mocked the writer, or the ambition of the writer, made nonsense of the personality the writer wished to assume — elegant, knowing, unsurprised. (Like Somerset Maugham. Or — a truer comparison — like the Trinidad Negro with the tight borrowed jacket in the hangar or shed at Puerto Rico, on his way to Harlem and quite another idea of glamour.)

So my memories of my arrival late at night in New York are vague. I think back hard now, and certain details become clearer: a very bright building, dazzling lights, a little crowd in a small space, a woman official with a very sharp “American” accent calling out the names of certain passengers.

There was a letter for me. A man from the British Consulate should have met me. But the plane had been so delayed he had gone home, leaving this letter, which gave me only the name of the hotel he had booked me into. He should have protected me. He left me at the mercy of the taxi driver who took me into the city. The driver cheated me, charged too much; and then, seeing how easily I acquiesced, he stripped me of the few remaining dollars I had on me (I had a few more, very few, hidden in my suitcase) by claiming them as a tip. I felt this humiliation so keenly that memory blurred it soon; and then eradicated it for many years.

I preferred to remember the taxi driver as being talkative, because that was the way taxi drivers were. I worked hard at remembering what he had said. (“We sold the Japs all our scrap metal and they shot it right back at us.”) And I remembered the Negro (he must have occurred in the hotel) who talked like a Negro in a book or film (“Dis city never sleeps” or “Dis city sho don’ sleep, man”) and whom I couldn’t tip because I had no money on me.