A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [75]
“Once a month or so I had lunch with a woman lecturer. She was about thirty, not bad-looking, and very kind to me. She was unusual because she was so much at peace with herself. That was why I liked her. It was she who made me do the absurd thing I am now going to describe.
“This lady had the idea that people like myself were at sea because we were men of two worlds. She was right, of course. But at the time it didn’t seem so to me—I thought I saw everything very clearly—and I thought she had got the idea from some young man from Bombay or thereabouts who was trying to make himself interesting. But this lady also thought that my education and background made me extraordinary, and I couldn’t fight the idea of my extraordinariness.
“An extraordinary man, a man of two worlds, needed an extraordinary job. And she suggested I should become a diplomat. That was what I decided to do, and the country I decided to serve—since a diplomat has to have a country—was India. It was absurd; I knew it was absurd, even while I was doing it; but I wrote a letter to the Indian High Commission. I got a reply, and was given an appointment.
“I went up to London by train. I didn’t know London very well, and didn’t like what I knew; and I liked it less that morning. There was Praed Street with its pornographic bookshops that didn’t deal in real pornography; there was the Edgware Road, where the shops and restaurants seemed continually to be changing hands; there were the shops and crowds of Oxford Street and Regent Street. The openness of Trafalgar Square gave me a lift, but it reminded me that I was almost at the end of my journey. And I had begun to be very embarrassed by my mission.
“The bus took me down the Strand and dropped me at the curve of the Aldwych, and I crossed the road to the building that had been pointed out to me as India House. How could I have missed it, with all the Indian motifs on the outside wall? At this stage my embarrassment was acute. I was in my dark suit and my university tie, and I was entering a London building, an English building, which pretended to be of India—an India quite different from the country my grandfather had spoken about.
“For the first time in my life I was filled with a colonial rage. And this wasn’t only a rage with London or England; it was also a rage with the people who had allowed themselves to be corralled into a foreign fantasy. My rage didn’t die down when I went inside. There again were the Oriental motifs. The uniformed messengers were English and middle-aged; they clearly had been taken on by the old management, if you can call it that, and were working out their time under the new. I had never felt so involved with the land of my ancestors, and yours, and so far from it. I felt in that building I had lost an important part of my idea of who I was. I felt I had been granted the most cruel knowledge of where I stood in the world. And I hated it.
“It was a minor official who had written me. The receptionist spoke to one of the elderly English messengers, and he led me, with no great ceremony and a lot of asthmatic breathing, to a room that contained many desks. At one of these my man was sitting. His desk was bare, and the man himself seemed quite vacant and easy in his mind. He had small, smiling eyes, a superior manner, and he didn’t know what I had come about.
“In spite of his jacket and tie he wasn’t what I was expecting. He wasn’t the kind of man I would have worn a dark suit for. I thought he belonged to another kind of office, another kind of building, another kind of city. His name was the name of his merchant caste, and it was easy for me to imagine him in a dhoti reclining against a bolster in a cloth shop in a bazaar lane, with his feet bare, and his fingers massaging his toes, rubbing off the dead skin. He was the kind of man who would say, ‘Shirtings? You want shirtings?’ and, barely moving his back from the bolster, would throw a bolt of cloth across the sheet spread on the floor of his stall.
“It wasn’t shirtings that he flung across the desk at me, but my letter,