The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [50]
It was at these moments that I found the island most unbearable. Study the paradox of my fantasy. I looked about me minutely; I was pained. And I discovered I was more pained than most. I was driving with Cecil’s father one day along a country road. We were in the area of swamps. Sodden thatched huts, set in mud, lined the road. It was a rainy day, grey, the sky low and oppressive, the water in the ditches thick and black, people everywhere semi-naked, working barefooted in the mud which discoloured their bodies and faces and their working rags. I was more than saddened, more than angry. I felt endangered. My mood must have communicated itself to Cecil’s father, for at that moment he said, ‘My people.’
I wonder why those calm words had such an effect on me. I hated the speaker. For the first time he had disappointed me. I had thought of him as ascetic and fair and pious. I thought that these qualities, which I admired, had come to him with that money and success to which I was so devoted; and for a long time, even after this incident, I attributed these qualities to people who had made their money the hard way. I admired his lack of show, his separation of his business life from his home life. I noted his quiet, sincere taste. In his back veranda, where other people would have had things like thermometers from the tyre companies and calendars from various firms, he had religious pictures and photographs of Indian film actors. He was not interested in the cinema and photographs of Hollywood stars in a private house would have struck him as hopelessly vulgar. But the Indian actors in his back veranda were on a level with the religious pictures: together they were an act of piety towards his past, a reverencing of the land of his ancestors. Details like this had gone towards the making of my picture of him.
And now I was disappointed. I imagine I had expected more passion and more pain. But I kept my thoughts to myself and merely said, ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ ‘They’ were the Stockwell estates, whose overseers’ houses, tall concrete pillars, cream concrete walls, red corrugated-iron roofs, presently appeared, rather close together, with no gardens to speak of and as bare of trees as the sugarcane fields in which they were set. Miserable crop! But the pain I felt was my own. Cecil’s father said, ‘Leggings cost money.’
The fields fell behind. The road ran between shops and two-storeyed houses. Traffic was slower in the main road of the small town and we were driving behind a lorry loaded with floursacks covered by a wet tarpaulin. On this tarpaulin lay two Indian loaders, soaked through. They studied us. Cecil’s father had the ability of his age to ignore such scrutiny. I returned the scrutiny; it was the scrutiny of compassion still. There was nothing of compassion in the restless gaze of our driver; he was merely impatient to overtake and get on. His chance, as he thought, came. But he had miscalculated the speed of the oncoming car, and he had to cut in in front of the lorry, which braked with a squeal. He was a new driver, glad of the job and anxious to keep it; the silence in our car deepened into strain. At the next slowing-up our driver was too cautious. The lorry overtook us and instantly cut in. The loaders were no longer lying down. They were sitting up. They began