Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [22]
The man was tall and slender, very dark and striking, in a formal charcoal double-breasted suit that emphasised his slen-derness. His crinkly hair was combed back flat above a long, narrow face with an amazing hawk-like nose. Every detail of the man approaching him answered the photographs Willie knew. It was Krishna Menon, the close friend of Mr. Nehru, and India's spokesman in international forums. He was looking down as he walked, preoccupied. He looked up, saw Willie, and out of a clouded face flashed him a friendly satanic smile. Willie had never expected to be acknowledged by the great man. And then, before he could work out what to do, he and Krishna Menon had crossed, and the dazzling moment was over.
A day or so later, in the little common room of the college, he saw in a newspaper that Krishna Menon had passed through London on his way to New York and the United Nations. He had stayed at Claridge's hotel. Willie looked at maps and directories and worked out that Krishna Menon might simply have walked that afternoon from the hotel to the park, to think about the speech he was soon going to make. The speech was to be about the invasion of Egypt by Britain and France and others.
Willie knew nothing about that invasion. The invasion had apparently been caused by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, and Willie knew nothing about that either. He knew, from his school geography lessons, about the Suez Canal; and one of the Hollywood movies they had shown at the mission school was Suez. But in Willie's mind neither his school geography nor Suez was strictly real. Neither had to do with the here and now; neither affected him or his family or his town; and he had no idea of the history of the canal or Egypt. He knew the name of Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, but it was only in the way he knew about Krishna Menon: he knew about the greatness of the man without knowing about the deeds. At home he had read the newspapers, but he read them in his own way. He had learned to shut out the main stories, the ones about far-off wars or election campaigns in the United States that meant nothing to him and went on week after week and were slow and repetitive and then ended, very often quite lamely, giving, like a bad book or movie, nothing or very little for much effort and attention. So, just as on the ship Willie was able to watch without seeing and hear without listening, Willie at home for many years read the newspapers without taking in the news. He knew the big names; very occasionally he looked at the main headline; but that was all.
Now, after his sight of Krishna Menon in the park, he was amazed at how little he knew of the world around him. He said, “This habit of non-seeing I have got from my father.” He began to read about the Egyptian crisis in the newspapers, but he didn't understand what he read. He knew too little about the background, and newspaper stories were like serials; it was necessary to know what had gone before. So he began to read about Egypt in the college library, and he floundered. It was like moving very fast and having no fixed markers to give an idea of position and speed. His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read. He turned in the end to a cheap history of the world published during the war. This he could hardly understand. It was as with the leaflets about London in the Underground stations: the book assumed that the reader already knew about famous events. Willie thought he was swimming in ignorance, had lived without a knowledge of time. He remembered one of the things his mother's uncle used to say: that the backwards had been shut out for so long from society that they knew nothing of India, nothing of the other religions, nothing even of the religion of the people of caste, whose serfs they were. And he thought, “This blankness is one of the things I have got from my mother's side.”
His father had given him names of people he should get in touch with. Willie hadn't intended to do so. Very few of the