A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [77]
“At last, but still not looking up, he said, ‘So?’
“I said, ‘I wrote in about joining the diplomatic service. I had a letter from Aggarwal and I came to see him.’
“Opening his letters, he said, ‘Mister Aggarwal.’
“I was glad he had found something we might fight about.
“ ‘Aggarwal didn’t seem to know too much. He sent me to Verma.’
“He almost looked at me. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Mister Verma.’
“ ‘Verma didn’t know too much either. He spent a long time with someone called Divedi.’
“ ‘Mister Divedi.’
“I gave up. He could outplay me. I said, wearily, ‘And he sent me to you.’
“ ‘But you say in your letter you are from Africa. How can you join our diplomatic service? How can we have a man of divided loyalties?’
“I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?
“He said, ‘You people have been living the good life in Africa. Now that things have got a little rough you want to run back. But you must throw in your lot with the local people.’
“That was what he said. But I don’t have to tell you that what he was really talking about was his own virtue and good fortune. For himself the purity of caste, arranged marriage, the correct diet, the services of the untouchables. For everybody else, pollution. Everybody else was steeped in pollution, and had to pay the price. It was like the message of the photographs of Gandhi and Nehru in the room outside.
“He said, ‘If you become a citizen of India, there are the examinations. We have arranged for them to be taken at some of the universities here. Mr. Verma should have told you. He shouldn’t have sent you to me.’
“He pressed a buzzer on his desk. The door opened, and the hunchback secretary sent in a tall, thin man with bright, anxious eyes and a genuine cringe. The new man carried an artist’s zip-up portfolio, and he had a long green woollen scarf wound about his neck, although the weather was warm. Without reference to me, with eyes only for the black man, he unzipped his portfolio and began taking out drawings. He held them one by one against his chest, giving the black man an anxious open-mouthed smile every time, and then looking down at what he was showing, so that, with his head bowed over his drawings, and with the cringe that was already there, he looked like a man doing penance, displaying one sin after another. The black man didn’t look at the artist, only at the drawings. They were of temples and of smiling women picking tea—perhaps for some window display about the new India.
“I had been dismissed. The hunchback secretary, tense over his old, big typewriter, but not typing, his bony hands like crabs on the keys, gave me one last look of terror. This time, though, in his look I thought there was also a question: ‘Do you understand now about me?’
“Walking down the steps, surrounded by the motifs of imperial India, I saw Mr. Verma, away from his desk again, and with more papers; but he had forgotten me. The idle merchant-caste man in the office downstairs remembered me, of course. I received his mocking smile, and then I went out through the revolving door into the London air.
“My crash course in diplomacy had lasted a little over an hour. It was past twelve, too late for the comfort of coffee and cake, as a sign in a snack bar reminded me. I set to walking. I was full of rage. I followed the curve of Aldwych to the end, crossed the Strand, and went down to the river.
“As I walked, the thought came to me: It is time to go home. It wasn’t our town that I thought of, or our stretch of the African coast. I saw a country road lined with tall shade trees. I saw fields, cattle, a village below trees. I don’t know what book or picture I had got that from, or why a place like that should have seemed to me safe. But that was the picture that came to