V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Such a send-off; and an almost private arrival at London Airport. This might have made me sensible of the pathos of the politics of places like ours. But now it fitted my mood. A representative of our Commission; junior officials from the Ministry; no newspapermen. But there was a motorcar and a chauffeur; and, at the end of the journey, a first-class hotel. There are few things as fine as an arrival at a first-class hotel in a big city. One is luxuriously housed, with the responsibility only of paying the bill. About one there is a muted, urgent hum of activity: a score of services await one’s lightest call. Glamour touches everyone: the chambermaid, the telephone girl, whose accent and intonation remain with one, the men at the desk, the girl at the newspaper kiosk. They are part of the fairyland, which continues as fairyland until one catches sight of the telephonist at her winking board, the weary uniformed figures sitting slackly on chairs in the laundry rooms, and one sees the pale night-clerk arriving in his shabby macintosh, until the structure of fairyland becomes plain, and the hotel becomes a place of work, linked not to the glamour of airline timetables in racks but to houses such as those seen on the drive from the airport. This is the time to leave; this is when the days begin to race and grow tasteless. Until this time, though, the hotel is a place which radiates its magic to the city.

I was free. Such talks with officials as we had planned were not to take place for a few days. I was alone. Many of my aides had disappeared into various corners of the city, seeking pleasure or looking up friends and relations, students or immigrants, for whom they had brought gifts of rum and cigarettes. How easily in this city they dwindled! A link, this, with my own past in the city. But this was the city which, exploring now from the hotel, I consciously tried to abolish. I had dissected and destroyed the glamour of this city; I had seen it as made up of individuals; I had ceased to see.

Now I tried to re-create the city as show: that city of the magical light in which I could walk without shadow. I tried to rediscover the warm, sweetly pungent smell of tobacconists’ shops and the acrid smell of the sooty cold air at dusk. I tried to be a tourist in the city which once had taught me the impossibility of escape. And such was my mood, I succeeded. For three days I was completely happy. The days were not quite blank. Each day there was some event to which I could anchor myself: a lunch with some businessmen; a dinner with the London representatives of our Isabella newspapers; an interview for the B.B.C.’s Overseas Service, recorded in Bush House, in whose basement canteen Sandra, macintoshed, hysterical with a vision of the future she was afraid to read, had proposed to me.

But there was the work of the delegation. The news from Isabella became worse; there was more violence; a paragraph appeared in the Daily Telegraph. We had our talks with the officials. They said what they had said many times before and what we expected them to say. They outlined clearly and concisely the consequences of nationalization. Our meetings need have lasted only a minute; we made them last three days and held daily press conferences which were ignored by the London newspapers. Was it my imagination, though, that detected a more than official hostility towards myself? I sensed that I was personally disapproved of, a racialist and a radical, a dangerous man, a troublemaker where there need only have been stability.

So the hardening of attitudes in Isabella, during my three free days, was reflected in London. I could do nothing; I had committed myself to our game. And I could not help adding to the unfavourable impression. The talks with the officials ended in failure. I insisted on seeing the Minister: it was the only thing left for me to do. My request was twice refused. I was told the second time that I could be invited to a lunch at which the Minister would be present. I used the last manœuvre that remained to me: I called the representatives of the Isabella press and told them of my request. Two days later I was told that the Minister would meet me, but without my delegation. It was better than nothing.

It was a brief, humiliating meeting. This man, whom in other, humbler capacities I had met more than once before on various government trips to London and had thought affable and slightly foolish, now barely had time for the courtesies. His manner indicated clearly that our game had gone on long enough and he had other things to do than to assist the public relations of colonial politicians. In about forty-five seconds he painted so lively a picture of the consequences of any intemperate action by the government of Isabella that I felt personally rebuked.

Then I spoke the sentence which tormented me almost as soon as I had said it. It was this which no doubt made the interview so painful in recollection. I said, ‘How can I take this message back to my people?’ ‘My people’: for that I deserved all I got. He said: ‘You can take back to your people any message you like.’ And that was the end.

I was shattered. I had entered the game so lightly. I had walked as a tourist about the Minister’s city. Now I played, but helplessly, knowing my own isolation, with visions of destruction. But all about me were signs of growth and gaiety, reconstruction and colour. I felt the hopelessness of the wish for revenge for all that this city had inflicted on me. How easy it was to dwindle in this city! How easy to be the boy, the student that one had been! Where now the magical light? I walked about the terrible city. Wider roads than I had remembered, more cars, a sharper smell. It was too warm for an overcoat; I perspired. I got into quarrels with taxi-drivers, picked rows with waiters and saleswomen. Undignified, but I felt I was bleeding, with that second intimation of the forlornness of the city on which, twice, I had fixed so important a hope.

Balm came from an unexpected source, from Lord Stock-well himself, whose estates were at issue. He wrote me a letter in his own difficult hand — each letter separate but barely decipherable — inviting me to dinner. I thought it politic to accept, though it was not pleasant to contemplate attending this celebratory dinner. So I thought it. I expected something vaguely official; I felt sure that the Minister had reported, with relish, our brief exchange. I began to secrete bitterness and found that it gave me strength of a sort. And it was in this mood, which had displeased me in others, that I went. The mood held drama; it supported me in the dark taxi-cab; I was prepared to assault the driver at the first sign of deviousness. I was ripe for a full public scene. It was a reaction of simplicity, based on an ignorance both of Lord Stockwell and of the behaviour of the secure. I ought to have known better; I knew better. I was astonished at myself, at this example of derangement and coarsening.

The taxi-driver was not devious. We parted in silence. I rang at the door. It was opened by a Southern European of some sort, slum-faced, pallid, grave. I noticed little else just then. I felt I had spent my life in interiors like these. It wiped out, what at that moment it should have sharpened, memories of black mud and red-and-ochre overseers’ compounds. The man took my overcoat, folded it and put it on a chair, below a Kalighat painting, momentarily disturbing because so unexpected: Krishna, the blue god, upright, left leg crossed in front of right, flute at his lips, wooing a white milkmaid. A door opened, my name was announced. Women, from whose faces I averted my gaze: the sudden reassertion of childhood training; a small man; a very big man moving towards me, very tall, a large paunch emphasized by a buttoned jacket, a heavy curving lower lip. I had expected someone much smaller and neater.