V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

The favourite for the Malay Cup that year was a horse called Tamango. It belonged to the Deschampsneufs stables. Tamango was popular at school as well, for special reasons. Many boys claimed Deschampsneufs as a friend and therefore claimed a special interest in his horse. Then the name was African; and though the significance of the name was known to be ambiguous, the Negro boys were pleased. At Isabella Imperial we all knew where the name came from. Some people outside didn’t know — so much we could gather from the sports pages, already notorious to us from the howlers Major Grant regularly culled from them; and this private knowledge made us more proprietorial. Tamango, in a simplified and abbreviated edition, was one of the French texts we used in the lower forms; we all knew that Mérimée story of the African chief, seller of slaves, himself treacherously enslaved, and finally a leader of revolt. It was typical of the coolness and ambiguity of the Deschampsneufs family to give such a name to a horse: they seemed constantly anxious to call attention to a past which they agreed had been disreputable.

The interest in his family’s horse made Deschampsneufs insufferable at school. He came in in the morning smelling of horse, with his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers wet and dirty and stuck with bits of grass. He looked harassed, as though he had been up all night, a man with worries which the frivolous sporting world, mere watchers and gamblers, taking pleasure for granted, could never know or appreciate. He permitted himself no levity throughout the day, and as soon as the last lesson was over he was off again. His manner invited anxious questioning. But all inquiry or interest made him impatient and rude. He was especially brutal with those boys who, partly to please him, pretended to know more about horses than they did.

Then the horse called Tamango disappeared.

The reaction at school was strange. The correct thing to say was of course that it was a pity or, if you wished to use a newspaper word, an outrage. But there were undercurrents. It was at once assumed that the horse would not be found; and it was also assumed that Deschampsneufs had in some way become vulnerable to further loss. His loss was tragic, but it made him ridiculous; and within two days the loss itself became something that could be justified. Boys who had put up with Deschampsneufs’s brutality became retrospectively irritated; the merit of the horse was questioned; and the very name Tamango, to so many a cause for pride, was now seen as a provocation and an insult.

After about a week we heard that the horse had been found. It was dead. That was all we heard at first, and the news surprised no one. But what I next heard chilled and sickened me and gave me more strongly than ever the sensation of rawness and violation: rubbery raw flesh, tainted holy oil. It was more than a death. A charcoal burner had found the animal, garlanded with marigold and faded hibiscus, on a freshly prepared platform of beaten and plastered earth. Heart and entrails had been torn out; but there were flowers on the animal’s mane, flowers woven into its tail; and the coat had been brushed as though by proud grooms. At the centre of the platform, on a smaller, shallow platform of its own, were the remains of a fire, still fragrant with burnt sugar, pitchpine, butter and coconut. Banana suckers had been planted at each corner of this smaller platform; and at each corner a swastika had been traced out in flour. Asvamedha: to myself alone I spoke the word. It filled me with unexpected awe and horror. An ancient sacrifice, in my imagination a thing of beauty, speaking of the youth of the world, of untrodden forests and unsullied streams, of horses and warrior-youths in morning light: now rendered obscene. My mind, at once literal and fantastic, created a picture of a deepening, endless tunnel: into this I felt I was ever descending, when all I wanted was to return to the light.

The killing of Tamango was inevitably linked with my father and his followers. The newspapers were outraged and called for action. But nothing could be established. The newspapers called for the destruction of my father’s camp and his eviction from crown lands. The administration ignored this unbalanced and ill-timed advice; the governor continued to be cool. At school it was hard for me, though. I was at one with those who abused me. Their abuse was touched with fascination, but their sense of sacrilege was not greater than my own. I could not ridicule; I could not defend. I was sorry for Deschampsneufs’s sake: the vindictive current still ran against him. I shared his anger, hurt and disgust. But when he challenged me to fight I fought.

I had never had a fight before and I was certain it would go against me. We were about the same height but Deschampsneufs was heavier. I thought that whatever I was going to do had better be done quickly; and I was as surprised as anyone when at the end of our first clinching I found that Deschampsneufs was on the floor and I was on top of him. That, I knew, was the limit of my success; through our unscientific tangling of arms and legs I could sense that he was recovering fast. I had a moment of alarm, and for an added reason. At the back of my mind was the thought that I had supporters. Now I saw that the battle was mine alone. And the defeated were always wrong. But our form-master was on the alert for just such a fight; the silence, unusual in a free period, warned him. He came and separated us. I was relieved. The boys who had offered me devotion before became more devoted now, they who were willing for me to have been alone.

In the history books, as I say, my father’s movement is now made to appear just another part of a recognizable pattern of events in one region of the world. The mood is seen to have created both the leader and the special event associated with him. That event was not the exodus from the city, the march away from the troubled docks of both strikers and volunteers. It was the killing of Tamango, That was the movement’s most famous deed, as central to it as the racecourse suicide was to the suffragette movement in England, They are both events which, becoming history, lose their horror and obscenity and appear the natural, almost logical, expression of a mood; they are events which now seem oddly expected and dramatically right. In Jamaica, the regional history books now say, dealing with the disturbed prewar period, there were strikes and riots; in Trinidad there was an oilfield strike during which three people were shot dead and a policeman was burned alive; in Isabella they killed a racehorse belonging to an old French family.

So the deed becomes a crystallization of an existing mood. But my memory of those days tells me that the deed in such a situation is necessary; that without it a mood is useless and burns itself out. After this deed our island changed, though change was not to show for fifteen years. It was like the loaders’ insulting of Cecil’s father, the gesture which suddenly reveals society as an association of consent and teaches, dangerously for the future of all, that consent can be withdrawn. And I go back to the leader and the deed. The leader intuits the necessary deed. The killing of a racehorse, a favourite for the Malay Cup, was outrageous and obscene to everyone on that sport-crazed island. Yet it became an acceptable rallying point of righteous, underground emotion. The successful leader works by intuition; such is the degree of self-violation he imposes on his followers, whom he must never cease to surprise.

But for me there was something more. Primitive, bestial, degraded: these were some of the words used by certain sections of the island. I shared their horror, but I had my own reasons. Asvamedha. I had read the texts, I knew the word. The horse-sacrifice, the Aryan ritual of victory and overlordship, a statement of power so daring it was risked only by the truly brave; purified by the tender Asoka; revived by those who came after; and performed, memorably, by the grandson of the general of the last Maurya to celebrate the expulsion of the Greeks from Aryavarta, the Aryan land. How had my father arrived at it? Was it simply the intuition of the leader? Was the act no more than what it was, accompanied by simple Hindu ritual which anyone might have observed and copied? Or was it an attempt at the awesome sacrifice, the challenge to Nemesis, performed by a shipwrecked man on a desert island? Asvamedha. Tainted oil, raw flesh. Chieftaincy among mountains and snow had been my innermost fantasy. Now, deeply, I felt betrayed and ridiculed. I rejected the devotion that was offered me. I wished to fly, to begin afresh, lucidly.