The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [48]
Such was the explanation I managed, though it was not in these exact words nor in this tone. In fact, as I remember, I stood close to the teacher and spoke almost in a whisper. He was a man who prided himself on his broad-mindedness. He looked humble, acquiring strange knowledge. We went on to talk about the Singh, and I explained I had merely revived an ancient fracture. Puzzlement replaced interest. At last he said, loudly, so that the others heard: ‘Boy, do you live by yourself?’ So, in kind laughter, the matter ended at school. But there remained my father. He was not pleased at having to sign an affidavit that the son he had sent out into the world as Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed into Ralph Singh. He saw it as an affront, a further example of the corrupting influence of Cecil and my mother’s family.
I have given a flippant account of this episode. Flippancy comes easily when we write of past pain; it disguises and mocks that pain. I have no material hardships to record, as is clear. But observe how weighted down I was with secrets: the secret of my father, who was only an embittered schoolteacher, the secret of that word wife, the secret of my name. And to this was added a secret which overrode them all. It was the secret of being ‘marked’. From inquiries I have since made I believe this will be understood right away or not understood at all. I felt, to give my own symptoms, that I was in some way protected; a celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive. This knowledge gave me strength at difficult moments, but it remained my most shameful secret.
So many secrets! I longed to be rid of them all. But it was difficult in Isabella. It was difficult at that school and with those boys. We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return. We denied the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors and windows, we who took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about visits to temperate farms. Whether we dissected a hibiscus flower or recited the names of Isabellan birds, school remained a private hemisphere.
There was a boy called Hok in my class. I liked him for his looks, his intelligence, his slightly awkward body, his girl-like way of throwing a ball. He had long, well-articulated fingers which he was in the habit of rubbing together whenever he was nervous. I envied him his elegant manner, and I believe he envied me my manner. With Deschampsneufs I had belching matches. With Hok I had another sort of competition. The class had decided that we were both ‘nervous’; we each decided to be more nervous than the other. We might gaze at the ceiling during a lesson and not hear the master’s call to attend. We ate paper while we spoke. I couldn’t keep up with Hok here. He was a reckless eater, and once during a lesson ate a whole page of a textbook before remarking on its absence. I, aware of the occasional surveillance of my father the schoolmaster at home, had to be content with the odd corner. I began to chew my collar; Hok almost ate his off. I ate my school tie to rags; the end of Hok’s tie was never out of his mouth; he chewed it like gum. Between us was another bond. We were both secret readers of strange books. We often caught sight of one another in the Carnegie Library; then we became furtive or tried to hide, each unwilling to reveal the books he was interested in. But I found out about Hok. He was working his way through the Chinese section. His name indicated Chinese ancestry, but he was not pure Chinese. He had some admixture of Syrian or European blood with, I felt, a tincture of African. It was a happy blend; it had produced a sensitive, attractive boy.
Sometimes our