Among the Believers

by V. S. Naipaul

  High up, at Shogran, it was overcast and cool, cold when it began to drizzle. The pines were immensely tall, and in places the land fell away so sharply from the road that it wasn’t easy to look down to the roots of the pines. On the safer side of the twisting road there was peasant destruction: the barks of the great pines had been hacked away, for kindling. Kindling was scarce here, where there was so little flat land and so little vegetation, only pines growing in the thin drift of soil around rocks.

  At dusk we were beside the river again. In a wide grassy clearing on the low bank, many camps had been set up. Fires burnt; tea was being prepared, roti being made; and here and there, for this evening meal, pieces of dried meat were being cut up. Camels (feeding before people) chewed their fodder. The camels of one camp were chewing holly branches. Just below the bank, on the rocks at the water’s edge, in the dark all colours reduced to grey and white, were the ponies and other baggage animals, free at the end of their day.

  The Afghans spread thick woollen rugs on the grass. I had noticed these rugs before. They were of undyed raw wool, dark-brown, with simple patterns in violent colours; and they smelled of sheep or goats, the Afghan smell, the smell that these nomads carried around with them. I was attracted to one rug; and at once Masood and the jeep driver—purely for pleasure, as it seemed—began to bargain for me. The old man, the head of the camp, friendlier than our earlier kohl-eyed dandy, asked for four hundred rupees. The jeep driver said it was too much. But we sat down with the other men of the camp and drank cups of sweet tea.

  Masood then led me away, leaving the jeep driver to complete the business. We looked at the baggage animals chewing at their leaves and branches; we walked among the tents and the cooking fires; we walked among the donkeys at the edge of the rocky riverbed. When we got back, the deal had been made: three hundred rupees.

  Everybody was happy. Hands were shaken all round; and the jeep driver, triumphant, took up the rug as though he had really been bargaining for himself. But I must have been affected by the altitude. When I looked at the rug in Rawalpindi later, I was astonished not only by its great size—at dusk, beside the river, I had thought it smallish—but also by the oddity of its pattern and colours, like the dots and wavering scrawls of an inflamed mind, work from the asylum. And perhaps to live that nomadic life is to be touched in the head in some way.

  The road climbed again. Even in the darkness the river showed white, breaking over rocks. The rocks grew larger; they grew enormous; once or twice the road passed below overhangs of rock. In the flat-roofed, multilevel houses on the hillsides there were yellow lights. Lights alone marked the houses, defined interiors; and gave a feeling of bareness and solitude.

  There was no solitude on the road. Sometimes people had camped just below it; in one place a man appeared to be asleep on the rock walling that shored up the road. Once we passed a whole camp spread out beside the road: twig fires, tents, sheep settled down for the night and looking in the darkness like the smooth rocks at the edge of the riverbed. The camp dogs, the thick-furred dogs of the region, barked and raced after us.

  Ever since the light had gone, the jeep driver had been playing Indian film songs on his cassette player. Sad, sweet songs of love and loss and longing accompanied us through the dark valley; and always it was a woman who lamented.

  Tum zindagi-ko ghumka fasana bana-gé.

  Ankho men intizar-ki duniya jagga-gé.

  You have made my life a tale of sorrows.

  In my eyes you have awakened a world of longing.

  Untranslatable, that magical second line, with its unexpected conceit, that world (duniya) of longing (intizar-ki) awakened (jagga-gé) in the lover’s eyes (ankho). It was the line that had kept the song alive for forty years; whenever the line came around again on the tape the driver’s boy sang it.

  Ik tees si dilmen ut-ti hai.

  Ik dard sa dilmen hota hai.

  A sort of dirge rises in my heart.

  A kind of pain happens in my heart.

  People were still on the march, though the night was now advanced; there seemed to be no set hours for marching and camping. Once we slowed down for a group chasing a bull that, all alone, had broken away from the caravan and was running back hard the way it had come.

  Then we appeared to lose the road. We got out of the jeep. It was very dark. The driver sent his boy ahead to prospect, and then went to prospect himself. He came back, and drove the jeep on slowly, leaving us where we were. We lost the jeep’s lights. The boy, returning, led us forward with the help of a flashlight. He offered me his little hand: his touch was unexpectedly gentle. We seemed to be walking over mud and rocks. We saw the jeep’s lights again. In the blackness it was hard to assess distance. The lights of the jeep seemed far away, as though the driver had gone some way before finding the road again. But then, seconds later, the jeep was just there, a few steps ahead.

  It seemed we had been walking over mud and rocks. But later, on the way back, in daylight, I saw that a glacier had come down and cut the road. The snow hung over the stone retaining wall of the road. The snow on its surface was old and dirty; but below that seemingly solid snow there was, at the end of the Himalayan summer, a great white cavern, and out of that dripping cavern there flowed a torrent.

  We were now among glaciers and torrents. The chilling sound of water was everywhere.

  The rest house at Naran was lit up, but no one answered. At Balakot, when we were bargaining for the jeep, the jeep driver had said there was a government hotel that charged one hundred twenty-five rupees for a room. Now he said the charge was over two hundred. Since I was calculating for four rooms—myself, Masood, the car driver who had brought us from Rawalpindi to Balakot (and had since been silent and self-effacing), the driver of the jeep with his boy—my heart sank. But Masood, who, with his anxiety about infections, also had something like a hypochondria about money, about being overcharged, Masood said that he had made it clear that the jeep driver and his boy had to make their own arrangements. But it wasn’t to the government place that the jeep driver took us. He took us to the Park Hotel, whose bright, crude signboards we had seen at various places on the road.

  The Park was a long, low building set well back from the road; it had a dimly lit verandah. The driver blew the horn, and a man in a blanket came out from a smaller building at the side of the plot. It was cold, had been cold for some time; but there was no warm room in the hotel to go to. The man with the blanket showed us a bedroom: two wood-framed beds, wall lights. He and Masood bargained, and Masood took me out from the cold bedroom to the freezing verandah to tell me that if an extra bed were placed in the room, I would be charged seventy-five rupees. So, from being a traveller with a little caravan, faced with a bill of a hundred dollars for the night, I had become part of a dormitory and liable only to a charge of seven dollars and fifty cents. I said I would sleep alone; I said I was a bad sleeper. Masood talked with the smiling hotel man, and it was agreed that the extra room would add twenty-five rupees to the bill.

  I asked for a fire in my room. The hotel man smiled and said it wasn’t possible. The chimney didn’t work; the room would be full of smoke if he lit a fire. That explained the comparative cleanliness of the fireplace. I asked for hot tea. Yes, that would come, with the dinner. What about the dinner? What did I want?

  Did they have eggs? No, there were no eggs. I thought of the clear river and said, “Trout?” Masood, translating for me, repeated the English word: “Trout?” The hotel man swung his head in affirmation and said, “Trout.” And Masood, still translating, said there was trout.

  Masood said, “Forty rupees for the permit.”

  “Permit? Do you have to have a permit for everything?” The word had made me think of the trouble I had had in Rawalpindi in posting books and changing traveller’s cheques.

  Masood said, huffily, “No.”

  It was too cold to talk any more about permits. I had looked forward to the cold. But now it was like pain; and the room se
emed to grow icier every minute. I had no woollen shirt or pullover with me. I decided to put on a second shirt below my safari shirt. When they saw me stripping they left the room and went out to the verandah. The door remained open; it was a freezing kind of half-privacy. I would have preferred the company, even a little help. My fingers were too numb to manage the buttons easily; and all around there was the very cold sound of tumbling water.

  When, double-shirted, I went out to the verandah, the hotel man had four limp trout to show: he clearly hadn’t had far to go. The jeep driver and his khaki-shawled boy now left us. As Masood had said, they had made their own arrangements; some warm mud-roofed peasant house no doubt awaited them.

  Masood and I (and our own silent driver) went to the kitchen, for the warmth. It was in the smaller building at the side of the plot. And though we had arrived only minutes before, though the negotiations had only just been completed and the four trout had only just been bought, there was a veritable staff at work in the kitchen on our dinner, and a wood fire was burning below a baking iron, and a man in a long-tailed blue shin was flattening balls of dough between his hands for the roti, the tail of his shirt jumping with every festive gesture, and the trout had been filleted and sliced and spiced and laid out on a low wooden table.

  I stood before the fire, in the way of the cooks. Masood sat on a cane-bottomed chair in front of the low table. We both constantly moved to close the kitchen door; the staff, as regularly, going in or coming out, left it open. Nothing was so important as the fire: not the state of the table on which the blue-shirted man was dusting the dough balls in flour, not the quality of the water in the red plastic bucket, not the chipped low table on which the filleted trout lay.

  The cook, always brisk, and satisfied now with his roti, used a knife to scrape off old charred fat from the round baking iron. He threw oil on the iron, withdrew the blazing wood to moderate the heat, put the fillets on the iron, put an aluminium pot-lid on the fillets, bent down to pick up an old brick from the blackened floor, and put the brick on the pot lid.

  Masood said, “Shall we eat the dinner right here?”

  He spoke my thoughts. And that was where we ate.

  A big, grand-looking man came in, with a fur cap and a slate-blue shawl. He wasn’t a villager or a man of the mountains. I thought he might have been a landowner or someone connected with the hotel; or a policeman, someone from an intelligence department, come to have a look at the strangers. He said he was a “compounder,” a chemist or druggist. He had a shop in Balakot, and a shop here in Naran. I said, “So you have two shops?” He said, “I have one shop.” The Naran shop was open in summer (officially, that was still the season); the Balakot shop was open in the winter.

  There was, in addition to the trout, a dish of meat for Masood and our silent driver (self-effacing even in the matter of food: he was anxious to appear to be eating less than Masood or myself). Hunger and cold made Masood forget himself, forget his anxiety about infections. He asked for water, with his meat. The kitchen boy, who had been staring at us all the time, leaning against the fireplace platform, dipped a glass into the red plastic bucket, handed the dripping glass to Masood, and Masood drank to the end.

  The compounder went away. He had had little to say, after he had told us what he did and where he lived and had found out who we were and what languages we spoke. The blue-shirted cook pulled out the wood from the fireplace. The flames were beaten out; the embers darkened fast. The kitchen was no longer open to us; we had to go out into the cold again. But the food had warmed us. It seemed less cold in the yard, less cold in the room. But Masood had been touched by the solitude and desolation of the valley. He stayed in my room to talk of himself and his anxieties.

  His anxieties were about his father and his family and about money. He felt he should be supporting his family; but he was in no position to do that. At the same time, he was anxious about his own scientific career, which had stalled for lack of money. He was twenty-seven; he had been a student all his life; and for some time yet, because of the field he had chosen, he had to continue being a student. It was hard on his father. His father hadn’t complained; all his father’s pride lay in his children and their education.

  “My father can’t go on working. He works so hard, from morning till night. He is a man of sixty-one.”

  “But if he retires he will have nothing to do.”

  “You don’t understand. I have told you what my father’s rank was in the army. My father was a noncommissioned officer, a very junior man. You don’t know what that means here.”

  At sixty-one, his father was earning seventeen hundred rupees a month as an accountant. And Masood was tormented by this and by his own helplessness, and also by his need to stick to his field.

  “It’s not an applied field. If it was an applied field, there would be money in it.”

  “Do you want to leave Pakistan?”

  “I don’t want to leave. There are jobs here I can get. But right now the government has stopped recruiting people. It might be temporary, this stopping. But I don’t know. I applied for a scholarship at an American university. They turned me down. They said that people from Indo-Pak were abusing the student visa. They got the visa and went and worked for a month or so, and then they disappeared. I can go to England, to Telford. They’ve given me a place. But where am I going to get the money? In some countries you can believe in the life of struggle. You can believe there will be results. Here there is only luck. In this country you can only believe in luck.”

  He didn’t know how directly he was speaking to me. The idea of struggle and dedication and fulfilment, the idea of human quality, belongs only to certain societies. It didn’t belong to the colonial Trinidad I had grown up in, where there were only eighty kinds of simple jobs, and the quality of cocoa and sugar was more important than the quality of people. Masood’s panic now, his vision of his world as a blind alley (with his knowledge that there was activity and growth elsewhere), took me back to my own panic of thirty to thirty-five years before.

  Masood’s parents had migrated to Pakistan from India in 1947. They had migrated, as Muslims, to a Muslim state ruled by Muslim beliefs. The state hadn’t altered; but Masood, liberated by that migration, had evolved; he (and his father) needed more than a Muslim state now. The regret Masood said his father sometimes felt about leaving India was both right and wrong: Masood’s father, in 1979, was not the man he had been in 1947. Masood himself, who knew only Pakistan, had no religious or political heroes; his Pakistani hero was a scientist, Abdus Salam, who worked in Europe (and a few weeks later was to be awarded a Nobel prize).

  Masood said, “They can give me a job at a university. I used to have one. But I no longer have it. Everything here is politics. For people to give me a job now will be for them to get into trouble with the authorities. I’ve been active in student politics.”

  “How good are you?”

  “I was one of the five best in my university.”

  He had talked of a thesis, the work he was doing, a doctorate he might soon be getting from a local university. Now, surprisingly, he said, “In a month I may be going away. A friend has arranged a contract for me with a West African college.”

  “Which one?”

  “A college.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “It doesn’t have a name. It’s just a college. A secondary school. They call it a college. I’ve worked out how much they will pay. Thirty-six hundred rupees a month.” Three hundred and sixty dollars.

  “That isn’t a lot.”

  “My friend says I can live on eight hundred rupees.”

  “I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “So I will save twenty thousand rupees.”

  “What about the tax? Have you found out about that?”

  “I haven’t found out about that. But it will solve the money problem for me.”

  “Will it damage your career?”

  He said irritably, “Of course it wi
ll damage my career.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “It will solve the money problem. I have to look after my family. My father is a man of sixty-one.”

  A year: ten months perhaps. I said, “All right. Go. It will improve your English, too.”

  He didn’t like that. “In ‘English as a Foreign Language’ I did well.” He gave the percentage. His English was variable, though. But he was a man of degrees and diplomas.

  The smiling hotel man came in.

  Masood said, “He wants the forty rupees for the fishing permit now. The rest he will take tomorrow.”

  He had also brought, for the bed, not a sheet—for which I had asked and which I thought he had promised—but a tablecloth. He took off the heavy eiderdown; spread the tablecloth evenly on the bed, as on a table; folded the eiderdown and left it at the bottom of the bed. Then he was gone.

  I began to make up the bed.

  Masood told me it was important to have the sheet (or tablecloth) below the eiderdown. “You don’t know who’s been using it.” He demonstrated. “Sleep in it like this. Don’t let the eiderdown touch you.” This kind of bed-making was something he—like me—had had to learn. In hot countries you don’t sleep below a blanket; you use a cotton sheet to cover yourself. What Masood was passing on to me was knowledge he had acquired. He had come from so far; he had had so much to learn; he had no one to follow. His simple origins showed in the way—when eating—he spat things out onto the floor; his distance from those origins (mingling now with his general anxiety) was expressed in his fussiness and hypochondria.

  He said, pointing to the pillow, which had a green damasklike cover, “And cover that, too.”

  When he left I did that, using the safari shirt I had worn during the day, putting the outside of the shirt against the pillow. I drew the thin cotton curtains; they didn’t meet. It was cold, but the eiderdown was heavy and comforting. In no time I was lulled by my own trapped warmth. I fell asleep to the roar of water. And—to my relief and pleasure—when I woke up it was morning.