The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [66]
I believe that when he left the Education Department – it might have been after an argument about a minute or a decision to appoint a schools inspector or even after a rebuke from an ‘enemy’ for having his hair cut in office hours – I believe he had in mind something like a repeat of the bottle-breaking incident, whose triumph had remained with him. But he had gone to the square and fallen in with strikers; a widow, resting her feet after shopping, had seen virtue in him. Ideas had been given him; he had begun to talk. He lost control of himself and events; even at the beginning, I feel, his movement ran ahead of him. What the missionary’s lady had seen in him, the aboriginal young man in the high collar, fighting his way up and out of poverty and darkness, was at last about to be fulfilled. The chance had come; he could swear he had not looked for it. It was now or never, and he must have known this. He must have summoned up all his original gifts. But now there was the transport contractor’s widow, with her especial piety; and the irony of my father’s long-prophesied success was that it came to him as a Hindu. It was the Hindu mendicant’s robe that he wore in the hills; and for all the emblems and phrases of Christianity that he used, it was a type of Hinduism that he expounded, a mixture of acceptance and revolt, despair and action, a mixture of the mad and the logical. He offered something to many people; but it was his example and his presence rather than his teaching which mattered. His movement spread like fire. Fire was the word. Sugarcane fields burned in his path. Calm in the hills, he offered disorder and drama. And at last the newspapers noticed.
I cannot say that the island was alarmed. We – if for the moment I can detach myself from so intimate a phenomenon – were if anything excited. On Isabella we were starved of large events and we secretly longed for the riots and burnings to continue. We felt we had at last caught up with the other disturbed territories in the region; we were flattered by the hints, now beginning to be thrown out, that we too were ripe for a Royal Commission. But for us who were of the family of Gurudeva – that was the name my father now took – the matter, as might be imagined, was somewhat different. My sisters were especially distressed; style and fashion cannot come easily to the daughters of someone regarded as a lunatic of the commonest sort. In the early days the movement drew most of its support from the three or four very poor areas I have mentioned. There was as yet little publicity, and nothing to suggest that the lunatic was beginning to be seen by some as a great worker’s leader, a successor to the revered Deschampsneufs.
The first reports that came to the street suggested only that a family which had for years been treated with respect had suddenly thrown up a type of street-corner preacher. Street-corner preachers had their place and enjoyed their own respect. But the lower classes looked for such people among themselves, and just as, out of that immorality which they accepted as a condition of their own existence, they abused the respectable who lapsed, so now they mocked us. They were tirelessly and grotesquely familiar. My sisters left the house and went to live with my mother’s family. The street was pleased; they had ‘driven out’ someone else; tradition had been maintained. My mother and I continued to live in the house. We were left more or less in peace, until my father’s new reputation, as a leader of the poor, made itself felt. Then we received more than respect; we were handled with a mixture of awe, reverence and familiarity, which was a degree more disquieting than simple hostility.
But my real troubles were at school. I had sought to suppress my father and the life of my family. Now, like Hok years before, I was betrayed; for me school could no longer be a private hemisphere. Our