The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [44]
volume called The Missionary Martyr of Isabella. It was one of a series of Missionary Martyrs: the decorated endpapers listed them all, some from places, like Thebaw, of which I had never heard. The martyrdom referred to in the Isabella book was not especially bloody: the missionary had died at an advanced age in bed, in his own country, but of malaria contracted in the tropics. The book was made up of extracts from the missionary’s diary, his wife’s diary, letters, sermons; and ended with the text of the oration over his grave. There were also many photographs which contrived to make Isabella look exceedingly wild. One of the photographs was of my father as a young man, almost a boy, standing in a group in front of a thatched wooden hut; the background was simple bush. The reproduction was poor, light and shadow ill-defined; and in the badly-fitting old-fashioned costume, which appeared to force his neck and chin out and up, my father looked faintly aboriginal and lost, at the end of the world, in a clearing in the forest. The impression was not altogether belied by the text, for in the diaries and letters of the missionary and his lady was a startling vision of the world. The centre of this world was their missionary activity; everything led outwards from this and led back to this. Isabella became an almost Biblical land, full of symbols and portents and marks of God’s glory, a land of stoic journeys through scoffing crowds, encounters with khaki-clad officials hostile to the work, and disputations with devious Brahmins in oriental robes seeking to undermine the work. It was not an island I recognized. Nor could I recognize my father from the descriptions in the diary of the missionary’s lady. It was she who had discovered my father. It was she who saw that, young as he was, he had the marks of grace. I read, incredulously, of the young boy, my father, ‘proclaiming the terrors of the law’ and urging ‘jeering crowds’ to ‘receive the Gospel of grace’. Again and again he came to the rescue of his patroness when she was ‘struggling unequally with a wily disputant’. ‘Let me speak,’ he said simply. Then she stood behind him; and ‘like a war-steed rejoicing in the din of battle he charged in where danger was greatest, and the antagonist was silenced’. One Sunday she was waiting for him at the mission house. He was late; she was getting impatient. Then she saw him in the distance cycling along the bumpy dirt road, and all thoughts of reproach went out of her head. She guessed he had had a puncture; she saw him ‘riding on his bicycle, as on an ass, to his Sabbath work’. He came slowly up, and then was cycling beside the tall hibiscus hedge of the grounds. All of him was hidden except for his white turban, which the sun caught and turned to dazzle; and she thought then she saw an angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth. I found this entry in the lady’s diary inexplicably moving. Always at this stage in the book I felt the need for a climax. But after this, in The Missionary Martyr of Isabella, there was no more of my father. The missionary’s lady, much younger than her husband and, from both their accounts, very frail, fell ill and was sent to her home; and after some years of solitary labour the missionary himself followed her. So that it had all led to nothing, so far as my father was concerned. When I read this book I used to get the feeling that my father was a man who had been cut off from his real country, which in my imagination was as glorious as the Isabella described in the diary of the missionary’s lady: nowhere else would people see magic in a white turban, a hibiscus hedge, a bicycle and the Sunday-morning sun. I used to get the feeling that my father had in some storybook way been shipwrecked on the island and that over the years the hope of rescue had altogether faded. The book, of magic, was in his bookcase; but he never spoke of it; I never saw him reading it. Perhaps he too felt that it described another man.
‘Your mother and her family can