V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Sanyasi, yellow-robed, among woods! Woods hymned endlessly in Aryan chants and found here on an island surrounded by a brown-green sea. It was his day of silence. When he came back to the hut from his shrine he greeted me without recognition at first. But then he put his arms around me. I remembered the embrace of his arms before, the day he towed me on the crossbar of his bicycle. He was gentle and silent. He went to the inner room of the hut. The sympathy that remained was for the idea of him. Gurudeva, asvamedha: these were the inspired moments, the fulfilment in a few weeks of a promise that had festered long.

But I had also come to repay a debt. It couldn’t really be repaid, but the gesture was necessary. I said to the woman, ‘I would like to leave this for Gurudeva.’ I gave her a prepared wad of a hundred dollars. Then I gave her three ten-dollar bills. ‘My father borrowed this from your son Dalip.’ Clad in white, the colour of purity, she took the money, showing no surprise.

Afterwards I went for a walk on the beach. The coast here was wild and untidy. The water at times frothed yellow with mud. The beach was littered with driftwood and other debris from the mighty South American rivers which, in flood, pushed their discolouring fresh waters as far north as this. The sand was black and pebbly and sharp. Another cloudy day, the clouds as dirty and ragged as the sea and the beach. I walked. The woods of crown lands gave way to the mangy coconut grove of a rundown estate. The trunks of the trees had orange blotches; beyond them were the white wooden houses of the labourers, white distemper streaked with the running salt rust of old tin roofs. There was a car on the beach. And in a little huddle in the shallows, as though in the vastness of sky and sea and sand they had come together for protection, was a white family, made up it seemed only of women and girls. A man, clearly of the party, was standing on the beach. A man burdened by women. We walked towards one another.

He said, as one sharing a joke, ‘You went to Gurudeva’s camp?’

‘I’ve just been to see him. I am his son.’

‘Oh! Deschampsneufs told me you went to see him.’

‘His son asked me to tea.’

He was not more than forty, but he had the used-up look of a man who had found his niche early and could already look back to a stupendous twenty years’ experience.

‘How did you like old Des?’ he asked.

‘He was all right.’

‘He told you about his ancestress?’

‘I heard about her.’

‘Poor Deschampsneufs.’

‘I don’t see how anybody can call Deschampsneufs poor.’

‘It’s pathetic, really. He’s got this French thing.’

‘I know.’

‘But of course, as you know, the Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’

The phrase came out whole: it had been used before. I felt choked. I wanted fresh air. I wished to be among people of greater fears.

‘Des told me you were going abroad to further your studies.’ He used the newspaper words. His thin hair fell crinkly and wet over his sallow forehead, above eyes hollow from glasses. ‘You know, it’s an odd thing. But I’ve never been abroad. All my friends they go abroad and come back and say what a wonderful time they had. But I note they all come back. I tell you, boy, this place is a paradise.’ That word again. ‘I suppose you going to do like all the others and come back with a whitey-pokey.’ Again that word.

He lifted his hand to his forehead to push back the loose hair. I studied his veins. They were like the map of a river. Whitey-pokey: I had learned to read that word. The Niger was a tributary of that Seine, in paradise. Fresh air! Escape! To bigger fears, to bigger men, to bigger lands, to continents with mountains five miles high and rivers so wide you couldn’t see the other bank, to journeys that took two days and a night. Goodbye to this encircling, tainted sea!

My friends from Isabella Imperial planned a dinner for me. I was overwhelmed by the gesture. It was sweet to find that after all the fumbling with relationships I had friends who wished to mark my going. Too sweet; too disturbing. When Hok came to take me in his car to the restaurant I made some excuse. I couldn’t explain why at the last minute I no longer wanted to go. It was an impulse of childishness, no doubt: a fear of the big occasion, a fear of warmth and friendship, a poisoning feeling of inadequacy and the wish to be alone with that sudden, nameless hurt. I don’t know. I was ashamed and regretful a moment after he had left, taking my excuse to the others. The next morning he brought the book they were going to give me. It carried all their stylish, evolving signatures. Fête Champêtre: The Paintings of Watteau and Fragonard. I felt that the choice of book had been left to Deschampsneufs.

It was only on the ship, well on my way, that I came upon a narrow strip of paper between the pages. It carried an unsigned typewritten message: Some day we shall meet, and some day. … I suspected Hok, because of the typing and because the paper was of the sort used for copy in newspaper offices. It was like that last family lunch my father had arranged. There is something after all in the staged occasion, the formal sentiment. It came to me on the ocean, this message ending in dots, telling me that all my notions of shipwreck were false, telling me this against my will, telling me I had created my past, that patterns of happiness or unhappiness had already been more or less decided.

I thought of Columbus as hour after hour, day after day — with no pause at night, as I had been half-expecting — we moved through that immense ocean. The wind whipped the crests of the waves into rainbow-shot spray. The sunlight grew paler and faded; the rainbows disappeared. I thought of that world which, as I was steadily separated from it, became less and less discovered, less and less real. No more foolish fears: I was never to return.

And witness me then, just four months later, standing in the attic of a boarding-house called a private hotel in the Kensington High Street area, holding a photograph of a girl and praying for a little bit of immortality, a prophylactic against the greater disorder, the greater shipwreck that had come to me already.

I WISHED then to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time. I was in London, awaiting health, Sandra my luck, when I heard that my father was dead. The news came in a guarded letter from my sister. I went to the British Council reading room, to which I had been long a stranger, to look at our local newspapers. What was not even a paragraph in a London paper had made headlines in the Inquirer, with photographs of the camp I had seen once, now unfamiliar and oddly exposed with officials and policemen standing about. My father had been shot dead, and a woman with him. The weapon was a Luger. The news required a response. It required sentiment and the opposite of sentiment. I walked about the streets. Later I went with a prostitute. I was full of my news. But I saved it for the end. Her shallow whorish reaction, of sentiment and reproof, was all I could have asked for. Later, in the blankness of night, I cried on Sandra’s breasts. And suddenly I discovered I was ready to leave. We left from Avon-mouth. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed south and sailed for thirteen days.

AS I write, my own view of my actions alters. I have said that my marriage and the political career which succeeded it and seemed to flow from it, all that active part of my life, occurred in a sort of parenthesis. I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts which in some way got out of control. But now, with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical or dishonest. I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others. The personality hangs together. It is one and indivisible.