The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [73]
In the history books, as I say, my father’s movement is now made to appear just another part of a recognizable pattern of events in one region of the world. The mood is seen to have created both the leader and the special event associated with him. That event was not the exodus from the city, the march away from the troubled docks of both strikers and volunteers. It was the killing of Tamango, That was the movement’s most famous deed, as central to it as the racecourse suicide was to the suffragette movement in England, They are both events which, becoming history, lose their horror and obscenity and appear the natural, almost logical, expression of a mood; they are events which now seem oddly expected and dramatically right. In Jamaica, the regional history books now say, dealing with the disturbed prewar period, there were strikes and riots; in Trinidad there was an oilfield strike during which three people were shot dead and a policeman was burned alive; in Isabella they killed a racehorse belonging to an old French family.
So the deed becomes a crystallization of an existing mood. But my memory of those days tells me that the deed in such a situation is necessary; that without it a mood is useless and burns itself out. After this deed our island changed, though change was not to show for fifteen years. It was like the loaders’ insulting of Cecil’s father, the gesture which suddenly reveals society as an association of consent and teaches, dangerously for the future of all, that consent can be withdrawn. And I go back to the leader and the deed. The leader intuits the necessary deed. The killing of a racehorse, a favourite for the Malay Cup, was outrageous and obscene to everyone on that sport-crazed island. Yet it became an acceptable rallying point of righteous, underground emotion. The successful leader works by intuition; such is the degree of self-violation he imposes on his followers, whom he must never cease to surprise.
But for me there was something more. Primitive, bestial, degraded: these were some of the words used by certain sections of the island. I shared their horror, but I had my own reasons. Asvamedha. I had read the texts, I knew the word. The horse-sacrifice, the Aryan ritual of victory and overlordship, a statement of power so daring it was risked only by the truly brave; purified by the tender Asoka; revived by those who came after; and performed, memorably, by the grandson of the general of the last Maurya to celebrate the expulsion of the Greeks from Aryavarta, the Aryan land. How had my father arrived at it? Was it simply the intuition of the leader? Was the act no more than what it was, accompanied by simple Hindu ritual which anyone might have observed and copied? Or was it an attempt at the awesome sacrifice, the challenge to Nemesis, performed by a shipwrecked man on a desert island? Asvamedha. Tainted oil, raw flesh. Chieftaincy among mountains and snow had been my innermost fantasy. Now, deeply, I felt betrayed and ridiculed. I rejected the devotion that was offered me. I wished to fly, to begin afresh, lucidly.
4
I WAS relieved when the war came and my father was interned under some wartime regulation. In this internment he was fortunate. He disappeared almost as soon as he had made his mark. He left behind a reputation which memory could heighten; he was spared the slow neglect, leading to derision, which would certainly have come. With the war, with the arrival of the Americans in Isabella, the building of bases, with the money and prosperity and the urgency it created, with that new sense of nearness to great events, my father’s movement would have died of its own futility. When he was released after the war he was no longer required. He was