CHAPTER 17 Citizen Théotime would come in in the mornings, red-eyed and tormented-looking, high on his

CHAPTER 17

Citizen Théotime would come in in the mornings, red-eyed and tormented-looking, high on his breakfast beer, with a couple of comic books or photo-novels to see him through office hours. There was an informal system of magazine exchange in the town; Théo always had something new to look at. And oddly, his comic books or photo-novels, tightly rolled up, gave him a busy, businesslike air when he came into the shop. He went straight to the storeroom, and could stay there without coming out for the whole morning. At first I thought it was because he wanted to be out of the way and not to be any trouble. But then I understood that it was no hardship for him. He liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer.

Later, when he became easier and less shy with me, his storeroom life became fuller. He began to be visited by women. He liked them to see him as a real _directeur__, with a staff and an office; and it pleased the women too. A visit could take up a whole afternoon, with Théotime and the woman chatting in the way people chat when they are sheltering from the rain--with long pauses and long hypnotized stares in different directions.

It was an easy enough life for Théotime, easier than anything he could have imagined when he was a mechanic in the health department. But as he gained confidence, and lost his fear that the shop might be taken away from him by the President, he became difficult.

It began to worry him that as a _directeur__ he didn't have a car. Some woman had perhaps given him the idea, or it might have been the example of other state trustees, or it might have been something he had got from his comic books. I had a car; he began to ask for lifts, and then he required me to drive him to and from his house. I could have said no. But I told myself it was a small thing to do to keep him quiet. The first few times he sat in the front; then he sat in the back. This was a four-times-a-day duty.

He didn't stay quiet for long. It might have been my easiness, my wish to appear unhumiliated: Théotime was soon looking for new ways of asserting himself. The trouble now was that he didn't know what to do. He would have liked to live out his role in fact--to take over the running of the shop, or to feel (while enjoying his storeroom life) that he was running the shop. He knew, though, that he knew nothing; he knew that I knew he knew nothing; and he was like a man enraged by his own helplessness. He made constant scenes. He was drunken,

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aggrieved and threatening, and as deliberately irrational as an official who had decided to be _malin__.

It was strange. He wanted me to acknowledge him as the boss. At the same time he wanted me to make allowances for him as an uneducated man and an African. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion. He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favour to him. Yet if, responding to his plea, I did so, if I took some simple shop document to him, the authority he put on then was very real. He added it to his idea of his role; and he would use that authority later to extort some new concession. As he had done with the car.

It was worse than dealing with a _malin__ official. The official who pretended to be offended--and bawled you out, for instance, for resting your hand on his desk--was only asking for money. Théotime, moving quickly from a simple confidence in his role to an understanding of his helplessness, wanted you to pretend that he was another kind of man. It wasn't funny. I had resolved to be calm about my dispossession, to keep my mind on the goal I had given myself. But it wasn't easy to be calm. The shop became a hateful place to me.

It was worse for Metty. The little services that he had done for Théotime in the beginning became things that he was required to do, and they multiplied. Théotime began sending Metty out on quite pointless errands.

Late one evening, when he returned to the flat after being with his family, Metty came into my room and said, "I can't take it, _patron__. I will do something terrible one of these days. If Théo doesn't stop it, I'll kill him. I'd rather hoe in the fields than be his servant."

I said, "It won't last long."

Matty's face twisted with exasperation, and he did a silent stamp with one foot. He was close to tears. He said, "What do you mean? What do you mean?" and went out of the room.

In the morning I went to collect Théotime to drive him to the shop. As a well-to-do and influential local man, Théotime had three or four families in different parts of the town. But since becoming a state trustee he had (like other trustees) picked up a number of new women, and he lived with one of them in one of the little back houses in a _cité__ yard--bare red ground intersected with shallow black drains all down one side, scraped-up earth and rubbish pushed to the edge, mango and other trees scattered about, cassava and maize and clumps of banana between the houses.

When I blew the horn, children and women from the various houses came out and watched while Théotime walked to the car, with his comic book rolled up. He pretended to ignore the watchers and spat casually on the ground once or twice. His eyes were reddened with beer and he tried to look offended.

We drove out of the bumpy _cité__ lane to the levelled red main road, where the buildings were freshly painted for the President's visit--each building done in one colour (walls, window frames, doors), and each building a different colour from its neighbour.

I said, "I want to talk to you about Citizen Metty's duties in our establishment, citizen. Citizen Metty is the manager's assistant. He is not a general servant."

Théotime had been waiting for this. He had a speech prepared. He said, "You astonish me, citizen. I am the state trustee, appointed by the President. Citizen Metty is an employee of a state establishment. It is for me to decide how the half-caste is to be used." He used the word _metis__, to play on the adopted name of which Metty had once been so proud.

The vivid colours of the buildings became even more unreal to me. They became the colours of my rage and anguish.

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I had been growing smaller and smaller in Metty's eyes, and now I failed him altogether. I could no longer offer him the simple protection he had asked for--Théotime made that plain during the course of the day. So the old contract between Metty and myself, which was the contract between his family and mine, came to an end. Even if I had been able to place him in another establishment in the town--which I might have been able to do in the old days--it would have meant that our special contract was over. He seemed to understand this, and it made him unbalanced.

He began to say, "I am going to do something terrible, Salim. You must give me money. Give me money and let me go away. I feel I'm going to do something terrible."

I felt his pain as an extra pressure. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own. I should have thought more of him. I should have made him stay away from the shop, and given him an allowance from my own salary, while that lasted. It was, really, what he wanted. But he didn't put it like that. He involved it in that wild idea of going away, which only frightened me and made me think: Where is he going to go?

So he continued to go to the shop and Théotime, and became more and more tormented. When he said to me one evening, "Give me some money and I will go away," I said, thinking of the situation in the shop, and trying to find comforting words, "It isn't going to last forever, Metty." This made him scream, "_Salim__!" And the next morning, for the first time, he didn't bring me coffee.

That happened at the beginning of the week. On Friday afternoon, after closing up the shop and driving Théotime to his yard, I came back to the flat. It was a place of desolation for me now. I no longer thought of it as my own. Since that morning in the car with Théotime I had felt nausea for the bright new colours of the town. They were the colours of a place that had become strange and felt far away from everywhere else. That feeling of strangeness extended to everything in the flat. I was thinking of going to the Hellenic Club--or what remained of it-- when I heard car doors slam.

I went out to the landing and saw police in the yard. There was an officer--his name was Prosper: I knew him. One of the men with him had a fork, another a shovel. They knew what they had come for, and they knew exactly where they had to dig--below the external staircase. I had four tusks there.

My mind raced, made links. Metty! I thought: Oh, Ali! What have you done to me? I knew it was important to let someone know. Mahesh--there was no one else. He would be at his flat now. I went to the bedroom and telephoned. Mahesh answered, and I only had time to say, "Things are bad here," before I heard footsteps coming up. I put the phone down, went to the bathroom, pulled the lavatory chain, and went out to see the round-faced Prosper coming up alone, smiling.

The face came up, smiling, and I retreated before it, and this was how, not saying anything, we moved down the passage before I turned and led Prosper into the white sitting room. He couldn't hide his pleasure. His eyes glittered. He hadn't yet decided how to behave. He hadn't yet decided how much to ask for.

He said, "The President is coming next week. Did you know that? The President is interested in conservation. This is why this is very serious for you. Anything might happen to you if I send in my report. This is certainly going to cost you a couple of thousand."

This seemed to me very modest.

He noticed my relief. He said, "I don't mean francs. I mean dollars. Yes, this is going to cost you three or four thousand dollars."

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This was outrageous. Prosper knew it was outrageous. In the old days five dollars was considered pretty good; and even during the boom you could get many things done for twenty- five dollars. Things had changed since the insurrection, of course, and had become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had become more greedy and desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of a great chaos coming; and some people could behave as though money had already lost its value. But even so, officials like Prosper had only recently begun to talk in hundreds.

I said, "I don't have that kind of money."

I packed a few things into a canvas holdall and Prosper drove me in the back of his Land-Rover through the brightly coloured town to police headquarters. There I learned to wait. There I decided that I had to shut out thoughts of the town and stop thinking about time, that I had as far as possible to empty my mind.

There were many stages in my progress through the building, and I began to look upon Prosper as my guide to this particular hell. He left me for long periods sitting or standing in rooms and corridors, which gleamed with new oil paint. It was almost a relief to see him coming back to me with his chunky cheeks and his stylish briefcase.

It was near sunset when he led me to the annex in the yard at the back, where I had once gone to rescue Metty, and where I now had to be fingerprinted myself, before being taken to the town jail. The walls had been a dusty blue, I remembered. Now they were a brilliant yellow, and _Discipline Avant Tour__--"Discipline Above All"--had been freshly painted in big black letters. I lost myself contemplating the bad, uneven lettering, the graining of the photograph of the President, the uneven surface of the yellow wall, the dried yellow spattering on the broken floor.

The room was full of young men who had been picked up. It was a long time before I was fingerprinted. The man at the table behaved like an overworked man. He didn't seem to look at the faces of the people he fingerprinted.

I asked whether I couldn't get the ink off my hands. It wasn't a wish to be clean, I decided after I had asked. It was more a wish to appear calm, unhumiliated, to feel that the events were normal. The man at the table said yes, and from a drawer brought out a pink plastic soap dish with a slender-waisted wafer of soap streaked with black lines. The soap was quite dry. He told me I could go outside and use the standpipe.

I went out into the yard. It was now dark. Around me were trees, lights, cooking smoke, evening sounds. The standpipe was near the open garage shed. The ink, surprisingly, washed out easily. A rage began to possess me when I went back and gave the man his soap and saw the others who were waiting with me in that yellow room.

If there was a plan, these events had meaning. If there was law, these events had meaning. But there was no plan; there was no law; this was only make-believe, play, a waste of men's time in the world. And how often here, even in the days of bush, it must have happened before, this game of warders and prisoners in which men could be destroyed for nothing. I remembered what Raymond used to say--about events being forgotten, lost, swallowed up.

The jail was on the road to the Domain. It was set a good way back, and in the space in front there had grown up a market and a settlement. This was what registered--the market and

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the settlement--when you drove by. The concrete jail wall, no more than seven or eight feet high, was a white background. It had never seemed like a real jail. There was something artificial and even quaint about it: this new jail in this new settlement, all so rough and temporary-looking, in a clearing in the bush. You felt that the people who had built it--village people, establishing themselves in a town for the first time--were playing at having a community and rules. They had put up a wall just taller than a man and put some people behind it; and because they were village people, that was jail enough for them. In another place a jail would have been a more elaborate thing. This was so simple: you felt that what went on behind the low wall matched the petty market life in front.

Now, at the end of the lane, after the lights and radios of the little huts and shacks and stalls and drinking booths, that jail opened to let me in. A wall taller than a man is a high wall. Below electric lights the outside wall gleamed with new white paint; and again, but in large black letters about two feet high, was _Discipline Avant Tout__. I felt damned and mocked by the words. But that was how I was expected to feel. What a complicated lie those words had become! How long would it take to work back from that, through all the accumulated lies, to what was simple and true?

Inside, behind the jail gates, there was silence and space: a large, bare, dusty yard with rough low buildings of concrete and corrugated iron arranged in squares.

The barred window of my cell looked out on a bare courtyard, lit by electric lamps high up on poles. There was no ceiling to my cell; there was only the corrugated-iron roof. Everything was rough, but everything held. It was Friday night. And of course Friday was the day to pick people up: nothing would happen over the weekend. I had to learn to wait, in a jail that was suddenly real, and frightening now because of its very simpleness.

In a cell like mine you very quickly become aware of your body. You can grow to hate your body. And your body is all you have: this was the curious thought that kept floating up through my rage.

The jail was full. I found that out in the morning. Quite a time before, I had heard from Zabeth and others about the kidnapping operations in the villages. But I had never suspected that so many young men and boys had been picked up. Worse, it had never occurred to me that they were being kept in the jail past which I drove so often. In the newspapers there was nothing about the insurrection and the Liberation Army. But this was all that the jail--or the part of it I was in--was about. And it was awful.

It had sounded, bright and early in the morning, like a class of some sort: people being taught poems by many instructors. The instructors were warders with big boots and sticks; the poems were hymns of praise to the President and the African madonna; the people being compelled to repeat the lines were those young men and boys from the villages, many of whom had been trussed up and dumped in the courtyard and were being maltreated in ways I don't want to describe.

These were the dreadful sounds of the early morning. Those poor people had also been trapped and damned by the words on the white jail wall. But you could tell, from their faces, that in their minds and hearts and souls they had retreated far. The frenzied warders, Africans themselves, seemed to understand this, seemed to know that their victims were unreachable.

Those faces of Africa! Those masks of child-like calm that had brought down the blows of the world, and of Africans as well, as now in the jail. I felt I had never seen them so clearly before. Indifferent to notice, indifferent to compassion or contempt, those faces were yet not vacant or passive or resigned. There was, with the prisoners as well as with their active

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tormentors, a frenzy. But the frenzy of the prisoners was internal; it had taken them far beyond their cause or even knowledge of their cause, far beyond thought. They had prepared themselves for death not because they were martyrs; but because what they were and what they knew they were was all they had. They were people crazed with the idea of who they were. I never felt closer to them, or more far away.

All day, through the mounting and then lessening heat of the sun, those sounds continued. Beyond the white wall was the market, the outside world. Every image that I had of that world outside was poisoned for me by what was going on around me. And the jail had seemed quaint. I had thought that the life of the jail would match the market life outside. Yvette and I had stopped at a stall one afternoon to buy sweet potatoes. At the next stall a man was selling hairy orange-coloured caterpillars--he had a big white basinful. Yvette had made a face of horror. He, the vendor, laughing, had lifted his basin and pushed it into the window of the car, offering it all as a gift; later, he had held a squirming caterpillar over his mouth and pretended to chew.

All that life was going on outside. While here the young men and boys were learning discipline and hymns to the President. There was a reason for the frenzy of the warders, the instructors. I heard that an important execution was to take place; that the President himself was going to attend it when he came to the town; and that he would listen then to the hymns sung by his enemies. For that visit the town had burst into bright colour.

I felt that almost nothing separated me from those men in the courtyard, that there was no reason why I shouldn't be treated like them. I resolved to maintain and assert my position as a man apart, a man waiting to be ransomed. The idea came to me that it was important for me not to be touched physically by a warder. To be touched in one way might lead to more terrible things. I determined to do nothing to provoke any physical contact, however slight. I became cooperative. I obeyed orders almost before they were given. So at the end of my weekend, with my rage and obedience, my exposure to the sights and sounds of the courtyard, I was a hardened jailbird.

Prosper came for me on Monday morning. I was expecting someone to come. But I wasn't expecting Prosper, and he didn't look too happy. The loot-glitter had gone from his eyes. I sat beside him in his Land-Rover and he said, almost companionably, as we drove through the jail gates, "This business could have been settled on Friday. But you've made it much worse for yourself. The commissioner has decided to take a particular interest in your case. All I can say is that I hope it goes well for you."

I didn't know whether this was good news or bad news. The commissioner might have been Ferdinand. His appointment had been announced some time before, but so far he had not appeared in the town; and it was possible that the appointment had been rescinded. If it was Ferdinand, however, this wasn't the best way for me to meet him.

Ferdinand, progressing through the world, had, as I remembered, accepted all his roles, and lived them out: lycée boy, polytechnic student, new man of Africa, first-class passenger on the steamer. After four years, after his time as an administrative cadet in that capital so dominated by the President, where would he be? What would he have learned? What idea would he have about himself as one of the President's officials? In his own eyes he would have risen; I would have got smaller. It had always unsettled me a little--the knowledge that the gap

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between us would get bigger as he grew older. I had often thought how ready-made and easy the world was for him, the village boy, starting from nothing.

Prosper delivered me to the people in the front office of the secretariat. There was a wide verandah all around the inner courtyard, and on three sides the verandah was screened from the sun by big reed blinds. It gave an odd feeling, walking through the thin stripes of light and shadow, watching them appear to move over you as you moved. The orderly let me into a room where, after the shifting verandah dazzle, spots of light momentarily danced before my eyes; and then I was let into the inner office.

It was Ferdinand, strange in his polka-dotted cravat and short-sleeved jacket, and unexpectedly ordinary. I would have expected style, a certain heartiness, a little arrogance, a little showing off But Ferdinand looked withdrawn and ill, like a man recovering from fever. He wasn't interested in impressing me.

On the newly painted white wall was a larger-than-life photograph of the President, just the face--that was a face full of life. Below that face, Ferdinand seemed shrunken, and characterless in the regulation uniform that made him look like all those officials who appeared in group photographs in the newspapers. He was, after all, like other high officials. I wondered why I thought he would be different. These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they exercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead.

Ferdinand said, "My mother told me you had gone away. I was surprised to hear that you were still here."

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connected with books. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go to. I've been on tour in the villages. It's a nightmare. All these airfields the man has built, the foreign companies have built--nowhere is safe now."

His face had been like a mask at the beginning. Now he was showing his frenzy.

I said, "What are you going to do?"

That had always been his way.

On his desk there was a glass paperweight--small flowers set in a half-sphere of crystal. He put the paperweight on the flat palm of his left hand and looked at it.

He said, "And you must go and get your steamer ticket. That was where we last met. I've often thought about that day. There were four of us on the steamer. It was midday. We drank beer in the bar. There was the director's wife--you left with her. There was the lecturer who was your friend. He travelled down with me. That was the best time. The last day, the day of leaving. It was a good journey. It became different at the other end. I've had a dream, Salim. I've had a terrible dream."

He took the paperweight off his palm and rested it on the desk again.

He said, "An execution is to take place at seven in the morning. That is what we are meeting for. We are going to witness the execution. It is one of us who is going to be executed, but the man doesn't know. He thinks he is going to watch. We are meeting in a place I can't describe. It may be a family place--I feel the presence of my mother. I am in a panic. I have soiled something in a shameful way and I am trying hard to clean it or to hide it, because I have to be at the execution at seven. We wait for the man. We greet him in the usual way. Now, here is the problem in the dream. Are we going to leave the man alone, to be driven alone to the place of his execution? Will we have the courage to be with him, to talk in a friendly way to the last? Should we take one car, or should we go in two cars?"

The steamer office was famous for its erratic hours. I sat on the wooden bench outside the door until the man came and opened up. The _cabine de luxe__ was free; I booked it. This took most of the morning. The market outside the dock gates had built up: the steamer was due that afternoon. I thought of going to see Mahesh at Bigburger, but decided against it. The place was too open and central, and there were too many officials there at lunchtime. It was strange, having to think of the city in this way.

I had a snack at the Tivoli. It looked a little demoralized these days, as though awaiting radicalization. But it had kept its European atmosphere, and there were European artisans and their families at the tables and men drinking beer at the bar. I thought: What is going to happen to these people? But they were protected. I bought some bread and cheese and a few expensive tins--my last shopping in the town--and decided to spend the rest of the time at the flat. I wanted to do nothing else. I had no wish to go anywhere or look at anything or talk to anyone. Even the thought of having to telephone Mahesh was like a burden.

Late in the afternoon there were footsteps on the external staircase. Metty. I was surprised. Normally at this time he was with his family.

He came into the sitting room and said, "I heard they let you out, Salim."

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He looked wretched and confused. He must have spent some bad days after reporting me to Prosper. That was what he wanted me to talk about. But I didn't want to talk about it. The shock of that moment of three days before had vanished. My head was full of other things.

We didn't talk. And soon it was as though we had nothing to talk about. There had never been a silence like this between us before. He stood around for a little, went to his room, then came back.

He said, "You must take me with you, Salim."

I tried to calm him down. "They always talk like this. Ever since the insurrection they've been talking of the morning when the whole thing is going to go up in flames. They talk like that because that is what they would like to happen. But nobody knows what is going to happen. And the President is smart. You know that. He must know they're preparing something for him here. So he'll get them excited, and then he may not come. You know the President. You know how he plays on the people."

I said, "Ali! I gave it away. You're right. I don't know why I did that. I could have given some of it to you. I don't know why I didn't. I never thought of it. I never thought of you in that way. You've just made me think of it. It must have driven you crazy. Why didn't you tell me?"

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He wasn't comforted. But it was all I could do now. He recognized that and didn't press me any further. Then he left to go to his family.

In the end I didn't telephone Mahesh; I thought I would write him later. Security at the docks the next morning wasn't extraordinary. But the officials were tense. They were like people with a job to do; and that was to my advantage. They were less interested in a foreigner who was leaving than in the African strangers in the market encampment around the monument and the dock gates. Still, I was constantly stopped.

A woman official said, when she gave me back my papers, "Why are you leaving today? The President is coming this afternoon. Wouldn't you like to see him?" She was a local woman. Was there irony in her voice? I was careful to take all irony out of mine. I said, "I would like to, citizen. But I have to go." She smiled and waved me on.

At last I went aboard the steamer. It was hot in my _cabine de luxe__. The door faced the river, which dazzled; and the sun fell on the deck. I went around to the shaded side, which overlooked the quay. That wasn't a good idea.

A soldier on the quay began to gesture at me. Our eyes met, and he began to scramble up the gangway. I thought: I mustn't be alone with him. I must have witnesses.

I went down to the bar. The barman was standing in front of his empty shelves. A fat man with big, smooth arms, a steamer official of some sort, was drinking at a table.

I sat at a table in the centre, and the soldier soon appeared in the doorway. He remained there for a while, nervous of the fat man. But then, overcoming his nervousness, he came to my table, leaned over and whispered, "_C'est moi qui a réglé votre affaire__. I fixed it for you."

It was a smiling request for money, from a man who might soon have to fight a battle. I did nothing; the fat man stared. The soldier felt the fat man's stare and began to back away, smiling, saying with his gestures that I was to forget his request. But I took care after that not to show myself.

We left at about midday. The passenger barge was not towed behind these days--that was now considered a colonial practice. Instead, the barge was lashed to the forward part of the steamer. The town was soon past. But for some miles that bank, though overgrown, still showed where in colonial days people had laid out estates and built great houses.

After the morning heat it had turned stormy, and in the silver storm light the overgrown, bushy bank was brilliant green against the black sky. Below this brilliant green the earth was bright red. The wind blew, and ruffled away reflections from the river surface near the bank. But the rain that followed didn't last long; we sailed out of it. Soon we were moving through real forest. Every now and then we passed a village, and market dugouts poled out to meet us. It was like that all through the heavy afternoon.

The sky hazed over, and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a broken golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow. There was a village ahead-- you could tell from the dugouts in the distance. In this light the silhouettes of the dugouts and the people in them were blurred, not sharp. But these dugouts, when we came to them, had no produce to sell. They were desperate only to be tied up to the steamer. They were in flight from the riverbanks. They jammed and jostled against the sides of the steamer and the barge, and

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many were swamped. Water hyacinths pushed up in the narrow space between the steamer and the barge. We went on. Darkness fell.

It was in this darkness that abruptly, with many loud noises, we stopped. There were shouts from the barge, the dugouts with us, and from many parts of the steamer. Young men with guns had boarded the steamer and tried to take her over. But they had failed; one young man was bleeding on the bridge above us. The fat man, the captain, remained in charge of his vessel. We learned that later.

At the time what we saw was the steamer searchlight, playing on the riverbank, playing on the passenger barge, which had snapped loose and was drifting at an angle through the water hyacinths at the edge of the river. The searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who, behind bars and wire guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlight was turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started up again and moved without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.

July 1977-August 1978

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About the Author

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, one of the most highly acclaimed writers in the English language today, was born in Trinidad to Indian parents on August 17, 1932. His grandfather was a Hindu from northern India who migrated to the Caribbean as an indentured laborer; his father was a journalist who inspired the young Naipaul in his future vocation. "At really quite an early age I thought of myself as a writer... because of this overwhelming idea of its nobility as a calling," he remembers. In 1938 the family settled in Port of Spain, where Naipaul attended the island's leading primary and secondary schools. At the age of eighteen he immigrated to England with a scholarship to University College, Oxford. After earning a degree in English literature in 1953 he moved to London to edit _Caribbean Voices__, a BBC radio program broadcast to the West Indies.

Naipaul's writing career began auspiciously with the publication of _The Mystic Masseur__ in 1957. A picaresque novel about an engaging con man who becomes a respected Trinidadian statesman, the book was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. _The Suffrage of Elvira__ (1958) and _Miguel Street__ (1959), a collection of short stories that won the Somerset Maugham Award, also exposed the follies of West Indian society.

The appearance of _A House for Mr. Biswas__ (1961), a tragicomic novel reminiscent of Dickens, marked a turning point in Naipaul's work. Widely regarded as his masterpiece, the book is a fictionalized account of his father's life that doubles as an allegory of the colonial predicament. _Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion__ (1963), his first novel to be set in England, earned him the Hawthornden Prize.

Naipaul began his series of studies of the emerging nations of the postcolonial world with _The Middle Passage__ (1962). Cast in the form of a travelogue, the book records impressions of British, French, and Dutch societies in the West Indies and South America. Following a year-long journey to India, he wrote _An Area of Darkness__ (1964), a controversial portrayal of his ancestral homeland.

Afterward Naipaul alternated between fiction and nonfiction in his exploration of cultural identity. In 1967 he brought out _The Mimic Men__, a powerful novel about the consequences of British imperialism that earned him the W. H. Smith Award, and _A Flag on the Island__, a second collection of short stories. Next he searched out the origins of modern Trinidad in a highly personal history, _The Loss of El Dorado__ (1969). _In a Free State__, an innovative work about British expatriates in a strife-torn African nation, won England's prestigious Booker Prize in 1971. _The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles__, a compilation of personal and political journalism, came out the following year.

The publication of _Guerrillas__ (1975), a haunting novel of murder and revolution on a Caribbean island recently liberated from colonial rule, firmly established Naipaul's reputation in the United States. After revisiting India during the state of emergency in 1975, he offered another unsettling look at the subcontinent in _India: A Wounded Civilization__ (1977). In 1979 he published _A Bend in the River__, a profound novel that delves still deeper into his recurring theme of displacement in a neocolonial world.

During the 1980s Naipaul focused mainly on nonfiction. He turned out a compendium of essays, _The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad__ (1980); _Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey__ (1981), a searching examination of the Islamic revival in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; and _Finding the Center Two Narratives__ (1984), an autobiographical essay and an essay on the Ivory Coast. _The Enigma of Arrival__ (1987), his

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only novel of the decade, is perhaps his most autobiographical. In addition he wrote _A Turn in the South__ (1989), a journal of his travels through the American South.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990; the same year he published _India: A Million Mutinies Now__, a more optimistic vision of the modern-day nation. In 1993 he won the David Cohen British Literature Prize. Naipaul's most recent novel, _A Way in the World__ (1994), is an inventive mixture of autobiography and meditation, a monumental tale of identity recovered.

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INTRODUCTION BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK

Salim, the narrator of _A Bend in the River__, is a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast of Central Africa, perhaps in what is now known as Zaire. The young man's placement in the world is part of the dramatic structure and vision of the novel. "Africa was my home, had been the home of my family for centuries. But we came from the east coast and that made a difference. The coast was not truly Africa. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian- Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean." In the novel, Salim has left the coast to make his way in the interior, there to take on a small trading shop of this and that, sundries, sold to the natives. The place is "a bend in the river"; it is Africa. There are other Indian families in the town, but the displacement of Salim is to some degree a part of the displacement of the country.

The time is post-colonial, the time of Independence. The Europeans have withdrawn or been forced to withdraw, and the scene is one of chaos, violent change, warring tribes, ignorance, isolation, poverty, and a lack of preparation for the modern world they have entered, or partially assumed as a sort of decoration. The blind assurance of the colonial administration, with its rules, its commercial exploitation of the available resources, its avenues and handsome houses and clubs for the pleasure of the foreign settlers, has given way to the blinding conflagrations in so many of the newly independent states. Here the power is currently in the hands of the President, a tribal warrior threatened by the ambitions of other warriors of other tribes.

_A Bend in the River__ is a story of historical upheaval and social breakdown. The collision of cultures in India, Islam, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean inform the extraordinary scope of Naipaul's creative imagination in fiction and in his books of travel about the world, journeys so angular and personal they cannot be classified as travel books. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, born into a Hindu family that had come generations back as indentured servants from the subcontinent of India to a tropical island in the Caribbean, where Hindus were a minority. Perhaps the shape of his vision owes something to his own placement in the world--something, but not everything, since he is a writer of great intellectual curiosity, deep culture, and the most serious kind of literary ambition. From Trinidad he made his way to Oxford and has lived in England since then, all the while producing some twenty-two volumes. His work gives the sense that to him the art of writing is a vocation, a sort of sanctified calling rather than a career. The biographical facts come to mind because there is a Savonarola tonality sometimes in Naipaul's eloquence about the damage of sentimentality and false hopes. In _A Bend in the River__, the creeping, suffocating corruption and destructiveness that accompany the tribal coming into power or plotting for power, the instability of arrangements, the unappeased crowds of long-suffering natives descending upon the town: all of this is the landscape in which the novel proceeds. There are Indian traders and proprietors of one business or another, a white European couple, an old Belgian priest of long residence, Africans seeking opportunity. The novel is an undertaking of some risk and out of the risk Naipaul has fashioned a work of intense imaginative force.

The President: "The President I had seen only in photographs--first in army uniform, then in the stylish short-sleeved jacket and cravat, and then in his leopard-skin chief's cap and his carved stick, emblem of his chieftaincy..." The myth-making of the President will consume

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the new nation as he consolidates his power, his wealth, his grandiose expenditures in a mini- city to be called the Domain, and in the elevation of his biography with statues to his mother, who had been a maid in a colonial hotel. "As an African, he was building a new town on the site of what had been a rich European suburb--but what he was building was meant to be grander... He was creating modern Africa. He was creating a miracle that would astound the rest of the world."

One of the characters in the book is Father Huismans, a Belgian priest, who has with a tireless obsession made a museum collection of native masks and carvings, information on native religions, and also scattered relics of the colonial presence. Father Huismans goes about digging and searching with a sort of nai've industry. He appears quite indifferent to the

drastic alterations brought about by the new government; he looks upon it as the flow of time in a mood of This too will pass. Nevertheless, he is brutally killed on one of his expeditions. The collection--"the richest product of the forest"--is left to deteriorate and to suffer the pillaging of an American admirer of primitive art. The Africans considered, or were told to consider, the collection of masks and carvings an affront to their religion.

Salim is an interesting _first-person__ narrator, and he oars his way through the shark- infested waters of that structural choice without showing undue exertion to keep afloat. He is sensitive, observant, of a somewhat melancholy inclination, a pessimism he does not attribute to to a Hindu "conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour." Instead his pessimism is not a result of religion, but of his "seeking to occupy the middle ground, between absorption in life and soaring above the cares of the earth." Nevertheless, he gets around, dines out, has an affair, plays squash at the Hellenic Club. "Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck-- it was like old times on the coast."

At the opening of the story, Zabeth, a native woman from one of the fishing villages, comes to Salim's shop to buy articles she will take back to sell to the natives, thereby making her living as a _marchande__. Salim admires the energy that gets her back and forth on the river and agrees, with a sigh, when she asks him to take on her son, Ferdinand, to place him in the lycée in the town and by education to rescue him from the "bush." ("Bush"--a term throughout that signifies not only vegetation but also the backwardness and primitive conditions and the primitive psychology perhaps of those cut off from the accommodations necessary for life in the towns and cities.)

Ferdinand will finish the lycée, go on to the polytech, and advance to an administrative position in the capital, where the President reigns. So Ferdinand is the new Africa, or the new African. He has escaped, but his progress is unsteady because the President and his troops are brutal and capricious; he who has risen can be cut down. When, later, Salim sees Ferdinand in the capital, he does not find a young man puffed up with pride and position but someone "shrunken, and characterless... These men, who depended on the President's favour for everything, were bundles of nerves. The great power they exercised went with a constant fear of being destroyed. And they were unstable, half dead."

Yvette, Belgian, and Raymond, English, are a couple who have parties, play Joan Baez on the gramophone, dance until the early morning, and so on. It is with Yvette that Salim will have an affair, a sort of alliance of bored colonials far from home, diverting, but not overwhelming. Raymond is an academic, an Africanist, writing his book while living on the scene as a specialist. He is a rather humble person, a sincere, liberal-minded collector of material from printed sources duly noted in footnotes. There is a comical aspect to his industry and to the position he reaches in the new Africa. Some time back, while teaching in a college in

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the capital, he had been visited by a striving African mother, the hotel maid who will later be canonized by the revolution. The mother visits Raymond for advice about the future of her son, very much in the way Salim had been called to "rescue" Ferdinand. Raymond meets with the son and tells him to forget law and the professions and instead to join the Defence Force. The son will become the President and Raymond will be his adviser, his White Man, as it were. Raymond is the voice of sincere hope for the country, for freedom, home rule, accommodation of the treacherous obstacles an exploited, ignorant nation will face. About the President he says: "He's a truly remarkable man. I don't think we give him credit for what he has done. He's disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples."

In the end, everything is overwhelmed, crushed by civic chaos. The President's power is challenged and the reprisals are bloody. He has no use now for his White Man, and when Salim goes by their house, Raymond and Yvette have gone. It is occupied by an African. His own store is confiscated, and he is arrested for--pessimist that he has been--storing gold and ivory against disaster. Ferdinand, harassed himself, is still in a position to get Salim released and to insist that he leave the country. So the Indian storekeeper from the coast has lived his time in a bend in the river and now must retrace the steps of his passage. Salim manages to get away on a steamer, the vessel of the advanced world, while desperate people hanging on to a river barge with the hope of escape are swamped.

The novel ends in darkness. It is a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with a poignant brillance.