A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  In the square, romantic with its lights and shadows, they talked of history and the new constitution and rights; but what had been generated was more like religion. It wasn’t something that could be left behind in the square; it couldn’t be separated from the other sides of life. And I understood the exaltation, and distance, I had sensed in people when I had visited my old office in the Red House.

  In the outer office of the Registrar-General’s Department I had remembered the lawyer’s clerks sitting like students at their sloping desks and searching for deeds in large bound volumes. They were modest but self-respecting people; some wore ties and white shirts. They had a kind of ambition, like everybody else. Sometimes they pretended to be more ambitious than they were, but many of them knew they weren’t going far, and they were reconciled to it, as you could see when sometimes an older man—of a generation without possibilities, a generation now more or less finished—came to do some searching, and led them all into a kind of pointless barber-shop chatter, like servant-room gossip, full of knowingness and conspiratorial hints, but really quite empty, mere words.

  (I had got to know about this barber-shop gossip even before I went to work at the Red House. After I had applied for my little temporary clerkship, word was sent back to me, through a cousin, from someone said to be in the know, someone deep in the machinery of the Red House: “Pereira is the man he have to see. All those papers pass through Pereira hand.” Pereira was a clerk in some department. One midday a man cycling down the Western Main Road was pointed out to me: “Look. Pereira.” The great man, just like that, in the Western Main Road, with everybody else! He was a mixed man, more Indian-looking than Portuguese, not old, and I suppose he was cycling home from the Red House for lunch. He had no hat and, in all the hot sun, he was taking his time, sitting upright on the saddle of his heavy, pre-war English bicycle, pen and pencil clipped to the pocket of his shirt, and with his socks pulled up over his trouser bottoms, which were neatly folded back over his shins. In another memory of this sighting, Pereira was on a slender-framed racing cycle, crouched over the dropped handlebars, sitting high on the narrow, ridged saddle, and pedalling away. The second memory is probably satirical and mischievous. I don’t know. I never saw Pereira again; I don’t even know whether the man pointed out to me was Pereira. I got the job because my former school principal recommended me for it, and no one talked to me about Pereira again.)

  Some of those search clerks in the Registrar-General’s Department were still there. They were easy with me; they were ready to chat. But there wasn’t the barber-shop slackness about them. I thought I detected a new intensity, a new stiffening; and I felt that that intensity—hidden, unacknowledged—had always been there, and even in the older man.

  I felt this even when I met simpler people. Like the paunchy department messenger, pleased to make the same joke he had made six years before (“You always query me. Why you query me so for?”). Or the elderly, sour-faced freelance searcher, waiting every day outside the office door for illiterates to come and give him work, living on the edge when I knew him, occasionally needing the gift of a drink, and now a little more broken down, his services less and less needed. Or the old Barbadian mason who had done work for our family. I used to like to see him at work; I liked his songs; and I liked the way the hairs sprouting out of his nostrils were dusted with cement, like a bee’s legs with pollen. He came to see me now. He stood on the pavement and leaned on the gate. He didn’t want to come into the yard because he had come to ask for money. Times were hard, he said. The lighter colour on his nostril hairs was not cement now, but the grey of grey hair. Even in these people I felt the new sacrament of the square, a little new glory.

  Much of this feeling might have been in me—I was full of nerves on this return, for all kinds of reasons—but I believe I was only amplifying something that was true. The history of the place was known; its reminders were all around us; scratch us and we all bled. The wonder was that it had taken so long for black people to arrive at this way of feeling. In our colonial set-up the champions of black people had been white men or coloured men like Belbenoit. Black men, with their self-distrust, had looked to such people to be their leaders. Political life had come late to black people; confidence had come late; too many generations had had to bury or mock their emotions in barber-shop gossip. There had been a big strike in the oilfields in 1937, but the leader there, a man from one of the smaller islands, had been more of a country preacher, uneducated and a little mad, quickly going idle after his initial political inspiration, and offering his followers only a kind of religious ecstasy. The new sacrament of the square went far beyond that.

  On this return everything I had known, every street, every building, shrank as soon as I saw it. I liked, as I travelled about, to play with this shift of scale, to compare what existed in my memory, from childhood and adolescence, with what existed now, as if suddenly, before me. In some such way every black or African person from my past altered. And I felt a double distance from what I had known.

  At the meeting I had gone to in the square I had seen a white family walk out in an interval between the speeches. They were an old trading family. I had had some slight dealings with them. For a few weeks, just before I went to work in the Red House, I had been a tutor to one of their children. I felt I had been tricked by them into accepting very low payment for what I did. They had left it to me to fix the fee, and I, not yet seventeen, hadn’t known what to ask. I had given a very low figure, moved by some absurd idea of honour. They hadn’t sought to match that idea of honour; they had paid me the very low fee I had asked, and no more. Old shame and rage (an aspect of the very mood of the meeting in the square) came back to me when I saw them.

  They had been standing at the edge of the square, noticeable, confident, respectful of the occasion. Perhaps they had gone for the show. But then, like me, they might have felt excluded; they might have felt the ground move below them. White people in the colony were very few, though; and they were not really threatened. Much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament of the square would have focussed on the Indians, who made up the other half of the population.

  The town had been important to me. Its discovery had been one of the pleasures of my childhood: the discovery of fine buildings, squares, fountains, gardens, beautiful things meant only to please people. Yet I had known the colonial town for only ten years. To me it had always been a strange place, a place I had come to from somewhere else, and was still getting to know. Now on this return I felt it had passed to other hands.

  In a few weeks I left. It was four years before I returned. And then I came and went irregularly, coming back sometimes for a few days, staying away once for more than five years. It was from this distance, and with these interruptions, that I saw this place I knew and didn’t know, which continued in its state of insurrection. People fell away, retired, died, went abroad. The time came when there were no offices for me to visit or people to call on.

  As with those pre-war pads of photographs showing a cricketer in action—pads of twenty or thirty photographs in sequence which you flicked to see, jerkily, Constantine bowling or Bradman holding the bat high up the handle and doing a cover drive—my vision of the place began to run fast.

  IT WENT into independence in its state of black exaltation—almost a state of insurrection—and with its now well-defined racial division: the Indian countryside, the African town. And soon the town I had known began to change.

  Black people from the smaller islands to the north came to settle. There had always been this movement of people from the islands; during the war they had come in some number to work on the American bases, and they had then built a sensational-looking, grey-black shanty town, of old wood and packing cases and rusty corrugated iron, on the bad-smelling swamp to the east. This immigration had never been legal, but now it increased. The immigrants were drawn into the local mood; they added something of the passions of their small islands, their small shut-in Africa
n communities.

  The immigrant shanty town spread, on the filled-in swamp and on the hills above it. To the west, at the same time, the town spread, with new middle-class developments along the coast (where there had been bathing places) and in the valleys of the Northern Range, where there had been plantations of cocoa and citrus until the Depression.

  The small town the Spaniards had laid out in the eighteenth century had had many squares or open spaces between its residential blocks; and there had been countryside and plantations all around. Now there wasn’t that kind of countryside, and the town itself began to feel choked. Already, during the war, the Americans had put up big two-storey buildings on some of the central squares, near the harbour. At about the same time the local government had built the Information Office on one of the Red House lawns; and some of the Office’s wooden notice-boards had been set up around the unplaying fountain in the open walkway of the Red House, under the pierced dome. Now, where there had been the notice-boards, there were rough and awkward wooden extensions to government departments, and they looked like big crates. The elementary school I had gone to was extended and extended; the grounds where we had played disappeared.

  Eventually there was no longer a division between town and country. That was a loss: as a child I had loved the separate ideas of town and country. In my memory I had made a journey from the country to the town; and then from the town I had made occasional holiday journeys to the country. If you were going to the east, you stood in the queue at the George Street bus station. Not long after you left the slums around the wide concrete canal known as East Dry River, you began to see big trees, patches of bush, and then you had glimpses of the sugar-cane plains to the south. To the west, the ending of the town was even more dramatic: there was, suddenly, a coconut plantation, and no house was to be seen.

  Now to east and west it was all built up, with no open spaces, no green breaks. There were just houses and houses; sometimes the plots were very small. There was always noise, no rest from noise. The impression was of people cooped up and constantly agitated in their small spaces. But new roads continued to be cut, especially in the narrow valleys to the west of the city; more hillsides were graded away; and the hill landscapes I had known (and written about in my spare time at the Red House) were so altered, so much a place now where I was without my bearings, so much the landscape now of other people, that I preferred for many years to stay far away.

  A new rubbish dump was established in the black-water mangrove swamp at the east end of the city, on the other side of the highway that ran through the shanty town—officially recognized, officially added to sometimes, but always a shanty town, and always growing, spreading over the hills. The fires of the rubbish dump burned night and day. The smoke was black turning to dark brown; it often billowed over the highway; the smell was high; you had to turn up your car windows. The people of the shanty town, men and women and children, worked in this smoke—emblematic silhouettes—raking over the rubbish for things that could be salvaged and sold. The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump.

  It was as though, with the colonial past, all the colonial landscape was being trampled over and undone; as though, with that past, the very idea of regulation had been rejected; as though, after the sacrament of the square, the energy of revolt had become a thing on its own, eating away at the land.

  IN THE square, at the beginning, all those years before, in the glamour of the lights—and where the beauty of the paved walks and the fountain would have been an aspect of the richness of the world that was about to be inherited—the speakers on the Victorian bandstand had talked of history and suffering and the great conspiracy of the rulers, and had suggested that redemption had at last come.

  It came for many. But that promise of redemption was so large that some people would have felt defrauded by what had followed. These people would have continued to find virtue in the original mood of rejection; and over the years they would have grafted on to that mood the passions of more extreme and more marginal and more publicized black causes from other places. So disaffection grew, feeding on an idea of an impossible racial righteousness; and there was always the threat of an insurrection within the insurrection.

  One year there was a serious revolt. The government survived, and afterwards the last big open space of the eighteenth-century Spanish city was blocked up. What had been the Calle Marina, the Marine Street, the wide square that ran the length of what had been the sea front, was offered as a market-place to the mutinous, dreadlocked people of the hills and the shanty town to the east. To enable them to compete with the established merchants of the city, the big square was built up with little wooden shacks, and there the shanty folk sold or offered for sale the simple leather and metal goods they made.

  This led to the further isolation of the city centre, the place we used to call “town” (and where, newly arrived in the city, I had gone walking one quiet Sunday afternoon with my father, so quiet that we had walked in the street, and I had seen our undisturbed reflection in the store windows). Shopping plazas and malls were established in the new settlements west and east of Port of Spain. There was no need to go to the centre; and sometimes now, when I went back to Trinidad for a few days, I never went to the city at all.

  People continued to live on their nerves. They did so even during the oil boom, when it seemed that money, given away every day in doles to everyone who claimed it, had come like a reward for their passions, their loyalty to their sacrament. When the Depression came, and times became harder than people remembered, the mood of rejection and righteousness was there again as a balm. But now there was a twist that the first speakers in the square would not have dreamed of.

  There began to appear, in Port of Spain and country towns, black men and women dressed like Arabs, the men in long white gowns and with white skullcaps, the women with black veils, men and women noticeable in the street, self-consciously righteous and apart.

  These people were Mohammedans of a new kind. They were not Mohammedans by inheritance, like some of the Indians of the island: people like Leonard Side of Parry’s Funeral Parlour and Nazaralli Baksh, the tailor of St. Vincent Street from fifty years before. Nor were they like the Black Muslims of the United States. These people gave the impression of being in direct contact with the Arab world. Here and there in the city centre, in what in colonial days had been a fashionable area, important property had been bought by these Arab-style Muslims. These buildings had their windows and verandahs blanked out, and they displayed green and white boards with Arabic lettering.

  They had occupied open public land in Mucurapo, near St. James, and built a little settlement and a mosque. This was not far from the cemetery of Mucurapo, with the very old and tall royal palms, and not far from the little house on the half-lot where, up to twenty years or so before, Leonard Side had lived with his mother. During the war the land had been occupied by the Americans. They had built enormous brick warehouses on it, like hangars. One such building had become the USO building, the entertainment centre for the Americans, very bright and glamorous to us, on the other side of the guarded fence. The land had been reclaimed from the shallows of the Gulf of Paria before the war: land built up on pebble-less and very soft black mud exposed at low tide. I remembered the reclamation taking place, the dredged-up black mud of the Gulf drying out in cracked grey cakes. (And long before that, and for hundreds of years, all this area, St. James, Mucurapo, Conquerabia, Conquerabo, had been Cumucurapo, an aboriginal Indian place.)

  People were nervous of this settlement, which appeared to be ever growing, to have money, and to obey its own laws. There was a school in the settlement. The group were keen on schooling; when you saw them at the end of the morning doing their shopping in the markets of certain country areas, they—adults, men and women—were like children after school, with textbooks and exercise books i
n their hands. But the books were in Arabic, and their schools were said to be Koranic schools. This idea of learning was distasteful to many local people; and, added to the Arab clothes they wore, further set the group apart. The mosque they had built was not like the usual local Indian mosque, a rectangular concrete structure with domes on top, and painted green and white. This was taller, more angular, and more flashily coloured. Local people didn’t know where the style had come from. I thought it might have been from North Africa; but I wasn’t sure.

  Late one afternoon, after they had said their prayers at this mosque—all this is as it was later reported—about a hundred of the men of the sect went with guns and explosives to St. Vincent Street. They assaulted Police Headquarters and set off a big explosion near the armoury. A number of policemen died in this first assault. Later or at the same time an assault was made on the Red House, obliquely opposite. The parliament was sitting. Shots were fired; people were hit. And then, as so often happened during slave revolts in these islands, the rebels appeared not to know what to do: all energy and exaltation had been gathered up and consumed in the drama of the attack, the surprise, the drawing of the first blood, the humiliation of the people in authority. For six days or so the rebels besieged the Red House and held the ministers of the government and everyone in the building hostage.

  The Red House and St. Vincent Street smelled of death. Some fifteen people had died in the late-afternoon assault, it was said; and a number of the bodies had begun to rot. There were stories that some of the bodies had been put in the Red House vault, near the entrance to which I had for some weeks had my table while I wrote out copies of birth and death certificates. How true the stories were I don’t know. But when the rebels had surrendered, and the siege was over, and the local papers carried photographs (taken from far away) of people leaving the Red House with handkerchiefs to their noses, I remembered the smell of the fish glue in which I had worked; and thought of the dimly lit, airless, oddly quiet vault, full of paper, where I had been told all the records of the British colony were stored, all the records, that is, since 1797, records of surveys and property transactions and then the records, starting later, of births and deaths, together with a copy of everything that had been printed in the colony.