V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Sometimes our class was taken to the Training College, to give the learner-teachers there practice. In our crocodile we were the object of attention of various sorts, to the embarrassment and sometimes fury of our teacher. But in our crocodile we were also in our private hemisphere, and we walked through the streets of our city like disrespectful tourists, to whom everything that was familiar to the resident was quaint and a cause for mirth: a snatch of conversation, the shout of a vendor, a donkey-cart. We were enjoying the sights of our city in this way one morning when some of the boys began to titter and whip their fingers, calling the teacher’s attention.

One boy said, ‘Sir, Hok went past his mother just now and he didn’t say anything at all to her.’

The teacher, revealing unexpected depths, was appalled. ‘Is this true, Hok? Your mother, boy?’

The crocodile came to a halt. Hok looked down at the pavement and went purple, rubbing his hands together. We looked for the mother, the hidden creature whom Hok saw every day, had said goodbye to that morning and was to see again in two hours or so at lunchtime. She was indeed a surprise, a Negro woman of the people, short and rather fat, quite unremarkable. She waddled away, indifferent herself to the son she had just brushed past, a red felt hat on her head, swinging her basket, doubtless bound for the market.

‘Hok!’ the teacher said. ‘Go and talk to your mother.’

He blew a whistle and we all stood to attention, exaggerating the military posture, the more greatly to impress the onlookers, the native, the ordinary. Hok continued to look down at his shoes and rub his hands, scraping alternate palms with his fingers.

‘Hok, go this minute and talk to your mother!’

She was receding serenely.

Hok turned and began to walk towards her slowly. She was almost at the corner. Soon she would have disappeared.

‘Hok, run! Do you hear me? Run!’ And the teacher himself ran after Hok, threatening him with his tamarind rod.

Hok shot off, running in his awkward girl’s way, and we who were secure and unbetrayed stood to attention and watched. We saw him gain on the dumpy little figure with the hat and the market basket, saw the figure, doubtless disturbed by the sound of running feet, turn in some agitation before Hok had caught up with her, saw the head inclining towards Hok, the black cartoon face to Hok’s purple, then saw them separate, the woman going round the corner, Hok turning and coming slowly back towards us, his purple face swollen as if about to burst, Hok the nervous, the secret reader, the eater of paper and ties, now totally betrayed and as ordinary as the street. The poor boy was crying.

It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was that he had been expelled from that private hemisphere of fantasy where lay his true life. The last book he had been reading was The Heroes. What a difference between the mother of Perseus and that mother! What a difference between the white, blue and dark green landscapes he had so recently known and that street! Between the street and the Chinese section of the Carnegie Library; between that placid shopping mother and the name of Confucius her son had earned among us for his wit and beauty. I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets. I felt on that street, shady, with gardens, and really pretty as I now recall it, though then to me wholly drab, that Hok had dreams like mine, was probably also marked, and lived in imagination far from us, far from the island on which he, like my father, like myself, had been shipwrecked.

I must explain. I cherished my mother’s family and their Bella Bella Bottling Works. But in my secret life I was the son of my father, and a Singh. China was the subject of Hok’s secret reading. Mine was of Rajputs and Aryans, stories of knights, horsemen and wanderers. I had even read Tod’s difficult volumes. I had read of the homeland of the Asiatic and Persian Aryans, which some put as far away as the North Pole. I lived a secret life in a world of endless plains, tall bare mountains, white with snow at their peaks, among nomads on horseback, daily pitching my tent beside cold green mountain torrents that raged over grey rock, waking in the mornings to mist and rain and dangerous weather. I was a Singh. And I would dream that all over the Central Asian plains the horsemen looked for their leader. Then a wise man came to them and said, ‘You are looking in the wrong place. The true leader of you lies far away, shipwrecked on an island the like of which you cannot visualize.’ Beaches and coconut trees, mountains and snow: I set the pictures next to one another.

It was at these moments that I found the island most unbearable. Study the paradox of my fantasy. I looked about me minutely; I was pained. And I discovered I was more pained than most. I was driving with Cecil’s father one day along a country road. We were in the area of swamps. Sodden thatched huts, set in mud, lined the road. It was a rainy day, grey, the sky low and oppressive, the water in the ditches thick and black, people everywhere semi-naked, working barefooted in the mud which discoloured their bodies and faces and their working rags. I was more than saddened, more than angry. I felt endangered. My mood must have communicated itself to Cecil’s father, for at that moment he said, ‘My people.’

I wonder why those calm words had such an effect on me. I hated the speaker. For the first time he had disappointed me. I had thought of him as ascetic and fair and pious. I thought that these qualities, which I admired, had come to him with that money and success to which I was so devoted; and for a long time, even after this incident, I attributed these qualities to people who had made their money the hard way. I admired his lack of show, his separation of his business life from his home life. I noted his quiet, sincere taste. In his back veranda, where other people would have had things like thermometers from the tyre companies and calendars from various firms, he had religious pictures and photographs of Indian film actors. He was not interested in the cinema and photographs of Hollywood stars in a private house would have struck him as hopelessly vulgar. But the Indian actors in his back veranda were on a level with the religious pictures: together they were an act of piety towards his past, a reverencing of the land of his ancestors. Details like this had gone towards the making of my picture of him.

And now I was disappointed. I imagine I had expected more passion and more pain. But I kept my thoughts to myself and merely said, ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ ‘They’ were the Stockwell estates, whose overseers’ houses, tall concrete pillars, cream concrete walls, red corrugated-iron roofs, presently appeared, rather close together, with no gardens to speak of and as bare of trees as the sugarcane fields in which they were set. Miserable crop! But the pain I felt was my own. Cecil’s father said, ‘Leggings cost money.’

The fields fell behind. The road ran between shops and two-storeyed houses. Traffic was slower in the main road of the small town and we were driving behind a lorry loaded with floursacks covered by a wet tarpaulin. On this tarpaulin lay two Indian loaders, soaked through. They studied us. Cecil’s father had the ability of his age to ignore such scrutiny. I returned the scrutiny; it was the scrutiny of compassion still. There was nothing of compassion in the restless gaze of our driver; he was merely impatient to overtake and get on. His chance, as he thought, came. But he had miscalculated the speed of the oncoming car, and he had to cut in in front of the lorry, which braked with a squeal. He was a new driver, glad of the job and anxious to keep it; the silence in our car deepened into strain. At the next slowing-up our driver was too cautious. The lorry overtook us and instantly cut in. The loaders were no longer lying down. They were sitting up. They began to abuse us. I have always hated obscenity; it was doubly hateful to have to listen to it with Cecil’s father. We turned up the windows. The loaders turned to obscene gestures and the gestures of threat. They indicated that they had our number and would hunt us down and shoot us and cutlass us. For minutes this went on.