V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

The taunting, as I saw it, began. Dalip was red with drink and his face was swollen, the eyes heavy-lidded. He threw some sand at my feet and said, ‘The son of the great leader. Well, let me tell you. I don’t think he is any great damn leader, you hear. He is a skunk. A crook. A vagabond. They should have locked him up long time.’

Strange this taunting. What was said left me cold. Yet I responded to it because I knew it was taunting.

Cecil, reclined against the tree trunk, that silver strap so noticeable on his bare arm, grinned in his breath-holding way. His valet grinned with him.

I began a sentence: ‘Who the hell do you think —’ and then gave it up, overcome by the weariness of thinking out and speaking a sentence to its end.

‘I will tell you something,’ Dalip said. ‘Your father owes me thirty dollars. Thirty dollars.’

When? Facing execution, my own helplessness, my own acceptance. When? I tried to imagine this other life my father had created, this rediscovery of himself and those gifts the missionary’s lady had seen: that other life, with its own familiar bonds, so familiar that they might include a request for money. In weakness, as a suppliant? Or out of the prophet’s strength and contempt for the things men held to be of value?

‘Thirty dollars.’

Tears came to my eyes. So suddenly I had taken on my father’s pain. It was a debt that had to be repaid, and instantly. Before the future took its course. Thirty dollars. What a sum! But it had once been needed. It had once been asked for. Poor Gurudeva! The tears were tears of my own humiliation as well. For all my wish to repay this debt, to wipe out this insult, I did not have this sum. But I ran to the car as though I had the money. I took out the dollar-notes from my trouser-pockets. Just about twelve. In the car, crouching over the seat behind the open door, I thought: the Luger. But I didn’t have the bullet. I remembered: that was in Cecil’s shirt. But I was unwilling to touch that shirt. Would I know how to insert the bullet? And perhaps the word and the horror lay only in my own mind. It was an absurd situation. The absurdity didn’t lighten me. I would have to go laughing to my death, and up to the last I would have to pretend that death was in no one’s mind. I left the Luger in the glove compartment. I ran back with the dollar notes and offered them to Dalip.

He said, ‘That’s not thirty dollars.’

‘I will give you the rest later.’

‘I just want my thirty dollars.’

I threw the notes at his feet. And of course, I thought, as they fell to rest on the dry sand, they won’t stay there when this is all over.

He hit me. I hit him, though I wished to go without a fight. And he was drunk. Cecil and his valet, side by side now against the tree trunk, laughed. Dalip threw himself on me. He was heavy, uncontrolled. He missed me and stumbled. He lifted a twisted and polished piece of driftwood. With this he tried to hit me. It was too heavy for him. It fell of its own weight and I was able to get out of the way. Cecil threw some sand on me. His valet did likewise. They had come closer.

Cecil said: ‘The Luger. The bullet in my shirt.’

And, really, I hadn’t thought he had left it in his shirt. The Negro ran easily to the car, a man with much time. I ceased to fight. I let Cecil and Dalip hit me. They threw me on the ground and punched me and kicked me. And even then I could not be sure of their aim.

‘Thirty dollars. Your father owes me thirty dollars.’ Dalip repeated the sentence over and over.

And I only thought: the sea, the sand, the green waves, the breakers, the quaint ships with sails, the morning music. Not my element, and I was ending here. And I had a vision of the three of us shipwrecked and lost, alien and degenerate, the last of our race on this island, among collapsed trees and sand, so smooth where no one had walked on it.

‘A car,’ Cecil’s valet said.

I heard the wheels on coconut husks and sand. A door slammed. There were voices.

Cecil laughed and said loudly, ‘But what the hell is wrong with this man on the sand?’

On a bank, just a few feet high, above the brackish freshwater stream from the cocoteraie, I saw a white family. I got up. Dalip got up. He didn’t laugh like Cecil and the Negro. He was still angry, still complaining about his thirty dollars. He still made attempts to fight. He was very drunk. Cecil and his valet kept on laughing, acting for the newcomers. I was forced to struggle with Dalip. The newcomers watched.

‘Swim!’ Cecil said.

The Negro ran to the water. Cecil chased him as if in sport. I threw off Dalip and followed them. He fell and remained where he fell. The family went walking on the beach, some in ordinary clothes, some in swimming costume. Dalip raised himself after a little and staggered to the car. He opened the door and appeared to collapse on the back seat among the clothes and the towels. I was at last out of the shallows. The water broke over me, the great breakers — the faded white board on the beach said in red Danger — and with every breaker I felt closer to myself. It was a coming back from far, as the hill people said. Whence had that mood of the previous minutes come? The sea and the sand. Oh, never again.

Later we found Dalip asleep and totally naked. He had tried to dress but had only got as far as taking off his swimming pants. He had tried to drink some more. The rum bottle was on its side and uncorked and almost empty; rum soaked and scented our clothes. He had apparently also tried to walk home. We followed his tracks through the dry hot sand below the coconut trees to the road. The asphalt was lumpy and rutted and full of holes, green at the base, in which water had collected. About fifty feet up the road he had collapsed. Soft, pale flesh, innocent abused face, genitals foolish and slack. We lifted him back into the car and put some clothes on him.

We drove back at a rate. The car was damp and gritty with sand and smelled of rum. We put Dalip down at his house. It was a large, clumsy, two-storeyed concrete dwelling, painted in vivid colours. I could see pictures of Hindu deities and Mahatma Gandhi in the top veranda. When we got back to the house they were only reading newspapers. Lunch was to come. It was still morning; the adventure had been brief. The story Cecil told was the story of Dalip’s drunkenness. He referred to nothing else.

Some doubt remained in my mind. Some doubt remains now. Dalip telephoned the next day and apologized. His voice was soft and winning. I told him not to worry. But I took care not to meet him. We met again years later, after we had both gone abroad and come back. By then the issue was dead; accounts had been settled, down to the thirty dollars.

I never went back to Cecil’s house. I never saw Sally again. They sent her off some months later to a girl’s college in the the United States. I knew she would never come back to Isabella. So she went out into the contamination of the wider world and was absorbed in it. And I was free to do the same. I was as blank as I had been at the moment we were discovered. I went to my office and wrote out my certificates and what grief I felt sank into the emptiness that had been with me for some time. That did not lift.

I heard more about the Luger, though.

Cecil’s father bought a cinema in the country. It was the last thing he bought. It was not much of an investment from his point of view, and I believe that at the back of his mind there was the idea, of a perverted asceticism, that what was frivolity to the rest of the world was to him business. At the end of his career he was back, in a way, and now from perfect security, to ‘fulling bottles with a funnel’. I also believe it was the last act of his special piety: the cinema showed mainly Indian films.