India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘So, after all these years, I found myself on the other side. But I couldn’t identify myself completely with the management, because I knew too well what life was like for others. But then the political situation in Bengal was becoming turbulent. Labour was unruly. The leftists had more or less gained control of the unions and the state. And the physical conditions in the city also started deteriorating. More and more firms were coming under the control of the Marwari capitalists. And then there was the oil crisis of 1973. I was in charge of procurement of oil for the factory. I really faced a rough time. Plus the power shortages, the difficult transport, and the labour militancy I had to put up with as part of the management staff. You might say I had found the right kind of job, but at the wrong time. I hated going to work in the mornings.

  ‘At the end of 1973 I quit – the problems in the job, the conditions of life in Calcutta. These things were compelling me to move out of Calcutta. I could only think of Bombay as the alternative, because my occasional trips to that city earlier – because of my job with Air India – had impressed me with its cosmopolitanism and its opportunities.

  ‘So, without having a job in my hand, I moved to Bombay with my little savings. In Bombay I stayed with a relative almost my own age who was running a photographic studio in a distant suburb. He had no room. But I used to live in the studio, sharing the common toilet with other tenants in the building, and an open space for my bath. We used to store water for our photographic needs, and out of this I used to bathe.

  ‘And I slept in a kind of loft that I specially made for myself. It was almost twice or thrice the size of an average coffin. It was just below the roof, and above the false ceiling of the front portion of the shop. I would climb into it by using the window bars as steps, and then I would slide myself into the small opening. I was comfortable. The air would come through the opening around the roller shutter. Often I would find this little loft to be the most convenient place for doing my reading and occasional writing – of letters, not articles.

  ‘I was earning a meagre sum, having started working in the studio. I would send most of this back to my people in Calcutta, because the four children of my sister were growing, and my stepbrother now had his own family to look after.

  ‘Initially I thought I would be able to build up the photography business with my relative, as I knew a little bit of photography as an amateur. But after a while, my savings having dried up, my relation turned out to be none too helpful. When I needed money he wouldn’t give it, and when I asked for the money I had already spent on the studio he wouldn’t return it.

  ‘So it was a strained relationship, although, helplessly, I continued to live there, sleeping and reading in my cubby hole, because accommodation of any kind was one real problem in Bombay. As the situation worsened, I decided to give up the idea of any photography business and having to depend on my relation.

  ‘As a first step, I put an ad in the classified pages of the Times of India. That must have cost me about 14 or 15 rupees – the paper charged concessional rates for job-seekers. I got 40 replies.

  ‘The advertisement I wrote read something like this: “South Indian secretary with over 10 years’ experience, with impeccable English, seeks interesting position in advertising, public relations, travel, etc.” I shortlisted the replies by choosing not to respond to companies located in the suburbs on the Central Railway, especially factories. The travelling conditions there were difficult and would involve a change of trains half-way from where I was living with my relation – that was an hour and a half away on the Western Railway line.

  ‘I decided to attend only four interviews, all of which were to take place around the Victoria Terminal in Churchgate, and were in offices rather than factories or workshops. Nothing happened the first day. I didn’t come to accept the jobs for varying reasons – salary, office atmosphere, and the interviewer himself. In fact, I told off one of the interviewers when he asked a very absurd question. “Why did you leave Calcutta after all these years? Those beautiful women there – you should have stayed at least for the rasgolla-like women there.’ I thought that was too degrading to women. Probably he found I was more than he required. It was a trading company, and he was one of those uncouth characters who had suddenly come into money.

  ‘The four interviews I had arranged were to last two days. Two a day. At the end of the first day I was somewhat despondent. I didn’t want to return to Calcutta. On the other hand, I didn’t want to make my life more miserable by being without much money and continuing to live with my relation. So I decided that if I didn’t get a job the next day, I would have to return to Calcutta, from where my sister had been persistently writing to me.

  The following day I came all the way from the photographic studio to Churchgate. On arrival at Churchgate station I went to Satkar Restaurant opposite the station. The board said: “Tea and Snack Bar”. I ordered myself an idli and a coffee – idli was about 60 paise and coffee was 40 paise – because I thought that was all I could afford, with my money touching the bottom.

  ‘As I was finishing my coffee, I looked through the papers, the letters from the firms I had shortlisted, to see who were the people I still had to look up. And there I found this call from a man who described himself simply as “Municipal Councillor”. His address was on “A” Road. I asked the waiter where “A” Road was. He said, “You are sitting on the very same road.” I found that the address the municipal councillor had given was just a stone’s throw away.

  ‘I made for it, and discovered it was an office within a residence. After I had waited for a while, a gentleman came in. This was my first sight of the man with whom I was to work for the next 14 years. He was a tall man – no, average, five foot seven, five foot eight. Very fair, not heavily built. He looked well groomed, well dressed.

  ‘He took me inside his office, and after a very brief conversation, 15 minutes, he straight away asked me to join him. Although I was readily impressed by the man, by his speed and quick decision, I did not accept his offer straight away, as I had to ponder over the salary offer he had made, which was 900 rupees. But he made no secret of his keenness to engage me. It looked almost as though he had guessed my situation, decided how much I should get, and made me an offer. To this day I don’t know whether he knows much about me, my background, my life away from the office.

  ‘He asked me to ring him back as soon as I had made up my mind, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to wait too long, because he had made up his mind that I was the kind of man he was looking for. I went back to the restaurant – it was a different waiter – and, after weighing the situation, had very nearly come to the conclusion that a job in hand was better than none. I phoned him up the next day, and joined him the Monday following.

  ‘When I got this job, there was an effort on the part of my relation in the photographic studio to patch up our relationship. But I didn’t want it. I stayed for three months after that in the cubby hole in the studio. Then I continued to move from place to place as a paying guest with various families – with problems of their own, of all kinds. I had a suitcase of clothes and another suitcase of books and knick-knacks. Two suitcases of possessions – that was all I had.

  ‘In my work for my employer I began to know people of importance. I enjoyed that. He was a civic leader and I could see that he was an ambitious man. I thought I would have opportunities of rising with him. And, indeed, he has risen in all directions. He is more famous and powerful and wealthy now than when I first went to work for him.

  ‘People who deal with me in my office might say that I have risen with him. But I feel it hasn’t been exactly in the manner I had hoped for. For a long time, while I worked here, my nomadic life as a paying guest continued, with my two suitcases, until I met a very kindly family – very hard to think of in a place like Bombay – who were generous enough to offer me a room all to myself, although in an old building. This was in 1980. I was forty years old. At that age, for the first time in my life, I had a
room of my own. This was a dream in a place like Bombay, where people have to sleep on the pavement and in drainpipes – and it was perhaps the best thing to have happened to me.

  ‘Until three years ago I lived on this charity, in a single room in that old house, with a common privy shared by 40 people. I couldn’t think of marriage then. My salary, though very good by Bombay standards, couldn’t have bought me a dwelling of any kind. But I’ve since been lucky, despite the odds, to acquire a flat or apartment of my own.

  ‘And then a friend of mine felt I should settle down. This friend knew that I had seen my responsibilities to my sister’s family through. He put an ad on my behalf in the matrimonial pages of the paper. It’s the classified ad which has brought me things, and now again the ad came into my life and changed the course of events for me.

  ‘Among the people who responded to the advertisement my friend had inserted for me was my prospective father-in-law. I had given my background and age in the ad. I had hidden nothing. I said I wanted a lady who would look forward to a simple life. I got about 90 replies, perhaps 100. They were from various parts of India. I think I got so many replies because I had said in the advertisement: “Caste, community, widows, divorcees, no bar.” I wanted a lady, though, who was already in Bombay, because that would settle many problems. Bombay life is so hard – there are language problems for people not knowing Hindi – and transport is hard, and generally the style of life is hard here. It isn’t an easy thing to get acclimatized to.

  ‘In about half an hour with my prospective father-in-law he was able to understand my basic character. The meeting took place in the coffee shop of the Ritz Hotel. He had come over to my office, but I had to keep him there for a couple of hours, this seventy-year-old man, because I wasn’t free when he came. He is a Keralite, but a brahmin. An average-sized man, bald, quiet-spoken, with the real stamp of patience on his face and in his demeanour. He was a retired electrical engineer in charge of purchase for a public-sector undertaking – part of industrializing India. He had been all over the country, and his children were broadminded.

  ‘About a week after this meeting I went to their house at about 10.30 at night, after a full day’s work. She was in bed. Her father woke her up. I spoke to her. She had been working for a nationalized bank for 10 years, took interest in yoga, and was not given to speaking much. She was average in her looks. She wasn’t fat, but because of her height she didn’t look lean. She was about four foot ten. She wore specs.

  ‘And after conversing more or less through her father and her mother, I felt I should meet her again and let her speak her own mind in a private talk, without the parents. After three days I met her once again in her cousin’s place. The cousin appreciated this attitude of mine, and made all appropriate arrangements, for privacy, etc. Over a cup of coffee we talked for a little over half an hour – she had just come back from her office in the bank. She wasn’t a great dresser. I had the impression she didn’t worry much about her attire.

  ‘After three days I telephoned her at her office, and this time we met in a restaurant. And by and large we agreed that we should get married. We got married in about 40 days. I wanted a civil marriage – no dowry, no give, no take; no crowding around with relations and friends; no party, no feasts, no gifts. But they didn’t want a civil marriage. So I called my cousin to perform the rites. I was totally without religion myself; I had never made a special effort to understand Hindu theology or principles.

  ‘I am happy at last in having a purpose in life, now that I have a family of my own. I’ve put an end to my otherwise unsettled life. Marriage came to me when I was forty-five. My wife was thirty-nine. We both had to wait a long time for this mercy. And God has blessed us with this added happiness that – at this late stage – we have had a child.

  ‘I am still left with the feeling that I might have risen much higher, given a litle more understanding and sympathy. Or perhaps in another country. What keeps haunting me all the time is the feeling that I am doomed to rise no more than I have risen. Even in this job I have been like a ship’s ladder. The sea rises, the ship rises, and the ladder rises with it. But the ladder cannot rise on its own. I cannot be independent of my employer and rise in life.

  ‘And yet I have, positively, a sense of fulfilment. When my father died, we were almost penniless, despite our earlier well-being. My sister brought me up early. And when my brother-in-law deserted her, it became my turn to take care of her and rear her children. I was able to do it. Today they are all well placed. I look upon them as symbols of my achievement.

  ‘And yet, too, I thought I would be some kind of creative person – like the persons I knew in Calcutta, when I first met you in 1962. But that kind of life and companionship has always eluded me. I started off as a secretary, and am still a secretary, and shall probably end as a secretary. I haven’t risen beyond what my father and grandfather could rise to, at the beginning of the century. The only consolation is that, even as a secretary, I am not as badly off as most other secretaries are. And perhaps, even, I no longer believe I am just a secretary.’

  3

  Breaking Out

  As soon as I got to the airport at Santa Cruz, the airport in Bombay for internal Indian flights, I felt like a refugee. There was a crowd at the entrance; and criminally inclined young men of the neighbourhood were trying to extort money from passengers for moving luggage a few feet from taxis to the doorway.

  Policemen were guarding the doorway against the young men, but they seemed not to be offering protection to people outside, even when they were almost at the door; and the young men, understanding this, ran two or three at a time to people just arriving, fell shouting on suitcases and bags, and tried to create an unbalancing atmosphere of frenzy. They were small and thin, these young criminals of the neighbourhood, and they were in tight milk-chocolate-coloured trousers of some synthetic fabric that showed up their frailty in hip and thigh. Their faces were small and bony, and their necks looked as though they might easily snap. Their wretchedness of physique didn’t make them less threatening: they called up the very thin, fawning-sinister figures of some of the Cruikshank illustrations for Dickens.

  Crowd and noise and threat and urgency outside, taxis coming and going in the mid-afternoon sun. Crowd inside as well, and noise, but it was a different kind of noise: it was more stable: it was the noise of people going nowhere. There was only one internal airline in India; it was a state airline, and it was in a mess. It was said by various spokesmen that the flights of this airline had to be late because many of them originated in Delhi, and there was fog in Delhi on many mornings. There were other problems. The airline had never had enough aircraft, and in the last few weeks a number of aircraft had been withdrawn for one reason and another. Services were now in chaos. But air travel remained a necessary badge and privilege for important people, scientists and administrators and business executives; and for weeks a fair portion of the country’s most eminent men and women was, at any given moment, becalmed in the country’s airports, as if by an act of enchantment. Items in the newspapers regularly told of depleted conferences on important subjects in this town and that town. Yet the demand for seats, especially at this holiday season, was greater than ever, and I had been able to get a ticket for this flight to Goa only through the intercession of an influential friend.

  In the airport hall the information screens flashed news of ever more flights delayed or abandoned. It was as though there had been some national emergency or disaster. The many grey-and-white screens gave constant, silent electronic jumps, delivering the bad news above the heads of the crowd, who were going nowhere but were not still, were in constant, very slow movement. My own flight to Goa had been delayed for five hours already. Now the screens, whenever (as in a lottery) the number of the Goa flight came up, promised a further delay of four hours. But some people had been waiting in the hall all that day.

  From time to time there were the sounds of aircraft taking off. They were tormenting
sounds: the planes taking off were the actual planes people were waiting to board, but at that moment different flight numbers were attached to them, and they were starting on roundabout journeys, with many stops, before coming back to Santa Cruz.

  My own flight to Goa would be in a plane that was coming from an unlikely town. This was told me by an athletic-looking man from Delhi, who went five times a year to Goa on business and knew the ways of the airline. This was all the information I had to hold on to; since after a certain time of night there appeared to be no airline officials anywhere, not even the young girls at the quaintly named Facilitation Desk. The advice of the man from Delhi was to watch out for the announced arrival time of the flight from the unlikely town he had told me about. If I added an hour’s turn-around time to that, I would have the time of my flight to Goa.

  I wasn’t to give up hope, the man from Delhi said. He knew for sure that the flight wasn’t abandoned. He had a cousin in the catering business – or he might have said that his in-laws did some of the catering for the airline – and he knew that his cousin or his in-laws had distinctly received orders for a plane-load of food-boxes for the Goa flight that day. This meant, he said, that the flight might even leave before midnight. This was the way of privilege in India: to know someone who knew someone who had a connection, even a tangential one, with an important organization.

  All this while – the bright light of mid-afternoon giving way to late-afternoon smokiness, to dusk, to undeniable night, to a dim fluorescent evenness in the hall – an elderly American lady had been standing next to the barrow or cart with her luggage. She wasn’t relaxed; she didn’t lean on the cart; her aged body was rigid as if with the fear of theft and the need to protect her goods. Her eyes were now blank, as though, not through tantric excess or meditation (which she might even have come to dabble in), but only by waiting in an Indian airport hall, she had arrived at the inner calm the famous gurus had the secret of. She had been waiting since morning and would have to wait several hours more. She was now mentally so far away that even when the pretty, plump Indian Muslim woman (herself waiting since the previous evening) got up from her chair and offered it to her, it was some time before the American lady understood she was being spoken to. When she understood that she was being asked to separate herself from her cart, her old lady’s face filled with alarm, and, speaking no word, she stood more rigidly in a protective posture beside her goods.