An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

  The medieval mind, which saw only continuity, seemed so unassailable. It existed in a world which, with all its ups and downs, remained harmoniously ordered and could be taken for granted. It had not developed a sense of history, which is a sense of loss; it had developed no true sense of beauty, which is a gift of assessment. While it was enclosed, this made it secure. Exposed, its world became a fairyland, exceedingly fragile. It was one step from the Kashmiri devotional songs to the commercial jingles of Radio Ceylon; it was one step from the roses of Kashmir to a potful of plasticdaisies.

  *

  It was under the houseboat-style awning in the garden that Mr Butt ceremoniously received his guests, lake folk or tourists. And it was there one very hot Sunday morning that, looking out of my window, I saw a neatly dressed young man, pink from the awning’s concentrated heat, sitting alone and self-consciously sipping tea, the hotel’s best china arrayed on a metal tray in front of him.

  Brisk feet pattered up the steps. There was a knock on my door. It was Aziz, breathless, grave, a serving towel or rag thrown over his left shoulder.

  ‘Sahib, you come have tea.’

  I had just had coffee.

  ‘Sahib, you come have tea.’ He was panting. ‘Mr Butt he say. Not your tea.’

  I went down to the young man. I had often been called upon to handle difficult ‘customers’ and sometimes to encourage acceptance of a price more realistic than that mentioned by Ali Mohammed at the Tourist Reception Centre.

  The young man put down his cup with some awkwardness, stood up and looked at me uncertainly. I sat down in one of the hotel’s weatherbeaten, shredding wicker chairs and invited him to resume his tea. Aziz, seconds before the urgent administrator, now the self-effacing, characterless servitor, deferentially poured for me and withdrew, never looking back, yet somehow – in spite of his loose flapping trousers, his tilted fur cap, the serving rag thrown rakishly over one shoulder, the soles of his bare feet flapping hard, black and cracked – communicating total alertness.

  It was hot, I said to the young man; and he agreed. But it would soon cool down, I said; you had these changes of temperature in Srinagar. The lake was certainly cooler than the city, and the hotel was cooler than any houseboat.

  ‘So you are enjoying?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am enjoying very much.’

  He had given me an opening and I made use of it. But he was not with me; he did not lose his look of embarrassment. I decided he was one of my failures.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ I put the Indian question.

  ‘Oh, I come from Srinagar. I work in the Tourist Office. I have been seeing you around for months.’

  Where I and my typewriter had failed, Mr Butt and Aziz had succeeded. But Aziz did not behave as though I had failed. He said that the kitchen was pleased with my handling of the young man, and a few days later he announced, as though I alone was responsible for it, that Mr Kak, Mr Madan’s deputy, was coming soon to the hotel, to inspect and possibly to have tea.

  Mr Kak came. I saw his shikara glide up to the landing-stage and I decided to hide. I locked myself in the bathroom. But no feet came tripping up the steps. No summons came. No mention of Mr Kak’s visit was made that day or on subsequent days; and I learned of the outcome of his visit only when Mr Butt, accompanied by the secretary of the All Shikara Workers Union, came into my room one morning to ask me to type out the ‘particulars’ of the hotel for inclusion in the Tourist Office’s register of hotels. I had failed; even my final cowardice was irrelevant. Mr Butt was smiling; he was a happy man. Dutifully, I began to type.

  ‘Hotel,’ said the secretary, looking over my shoulder, ‘is Western style.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Butt said. ‘Western style.’

  ‘I can’t type that,’ I said. ‘Hotel is not Western style.’

  ‘Flush system,’ Mr Butt said. ‘English food. Western style.’

  I got up and pointed through the open window to a little roofed box next to the kitchen hut.

  The box was perhaps six feet long, four feet wide and five feet high. And it was inhabited. By a thin, sour middle-aged couple whom we had christened the Borrowers. They were Jains. They had brought their pots and pans to Kashmir; they cooked for themselves; they washed up for themselves, scouring their vessels with mud, of which there was now a plentiful supply around the garden tap. They had at first been simple tourists, occupying one of the lower rooms. But they had a transistor radio; and often I saw them sitting under the awning with Mr Butt, all three concentrating on the transistor which, aerial up, volume up, stood on the table between them. We heard from Aziz that a sale was being negotiated; and it must have been during the negotiations that we saw one morning a brisk, brief transferring of pots and pans, bed and bedding, stool and chair, from the hotel room to the tiny box, which that evening appeared to shiver with light, escaping through cracks and gaps, and with music from the transistor. There was a window, one foot square, Kashmiri-carpentered, crookedly hinged. Through this I tried to get a glimpse of the arrangements inside. I was spotted. A woman’s hand pulled the tiny, sagging window to, and closed it with a proprietorial, offended bang.

  To this box I now pointed.

  The secretary giggled and Mr Butt smiled. ‘Sir, sir,’ he said, laying his hand on his heart. ‘Forgive, forgive.’

  *

  Srinagar was hot, and the tourists now went higher up, to Pahalgam, which we were told was ‘Indian taste’, and Gulmarg, which was ‘English’. Presently we had the hotel to ourselves again, as it had been in the early spring. There was no washing on the lawn; no cooking parties in the broom-cupboard below the steps. The mud around the garden tap dried to black, caked earth; and in the garden the sunflowers were indeed like emblematic whirls of colour. Even the tradesmen grew torpid. Maulana Worthwhile, who sold shawls, called to ask if I had any English shoe polish, the only thing, according to him, which was good for his ringworm. The regional court held new elections under the awning and we celebrated with cake and tea. Aziz daily dropped hints about Gulmarg. ‘When you going Gulmarg, sir?’ He wanted us to take him there, and it was only during these slack weeks that he could leave the hotel. But we put off Gulmarg from day to day, becalmed in the summer stillness of the lake.

  Then all at once stillness and peace vanished.

  There was a holy man in Delhi. It happened this year that there came to Delhi from East Africa a pious family of wealthy Indian merchants. They met the holy man. He liked them; and they were so taken with him they thought they would devote their holiday to his service. The monsoon was delayed that year and, sitting in Delhi, the holy man said, ‘I feel an urge to go now to Kashmir, the holy land of Hindus, the land of the holy cave of Amarnath, the purifying icy Lake of the Thousand Serpents, and the plain where Lord Shiva danced.’ The merchants at once packed their American limousines with all that was necessary. ‘I fear the journey will be too much for me,’ the holy man said. ‘You go by motor-car. I will follow by Viscount aeroplane.’ They made the arrangements and then drove north for a day and a night until they came to the holy city of Srinagar. It was nearly midnight when they arrived. But the news of the arrival of twenty pilgrims spread rapidly from houseboat to empty houseboat, and wherever they went they were followed by shrieking men anxious to give them lodging. When they came to a small hotel on a plot of ground in the lake they said, ‘This is what we have been looking for. We will stay here and await our holy man.’ Still, through the night the houseboat men came, trying to get them on to their vessels, and there were many disputes.

  This was Ali Mohammed’s story.

  ‘But they say,’ he told us at breakfast, ‘ “We don’t want houseboat, we want here.” ’

  It was the hotel’s biggest kill, and Ali Mohammed was pleased. He was not Aziz; he could not sympathize with us. Nor could Aziz. He, as if recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, stayed away from us altogether.

  They had come equipped for holiness. In their limousines, the wonder
of the lake folk, they had brought bundles of especially holy leaves, off which they were to eat, like the sages in the days before plates were plentiful. They did not trust tap-water; they had brought special containers and early in the morning they went off to Chasmashahi, the Royal Spring, to get pure spring water. They had of course to cook for themselves; and the cooking was done, on stones placed on the lawn, by four epicene saffron-robed young men who, when their duties were done, simply idled: they had a fantastic capacity for inactivity. Holiness meant simplicity of this sort: cooking on stones, eating off leaves, fetching water from the spring. It also meant casualness and disorder. Rugs were rolled up in the hotel rooms, curtains hooked up high, furniture disarranged. Simplicity and the possession of a holy man induced arrogance. The men among the pilgrims strutted about the lawn, reducing Ali and Aziz and even Mr Butt to tiptoeing insignificance. They spoke loudly. They hawked loudly and spat with noisy repeated relish everywhere but more especially on the water-lilies, plants which had been introduced to Kashmir from England by the last maharaja and were without the religious associations of the lotus. After their meal, eaten off leaves on the very lawn on which they had been spitting, they belched. They belched thunderously but always with control: it was possible to tell, from the belches alone, who was the leader of the party. He was about forty, tall and fat; a singular element of his holy dress was the multicoloured towel he wore wrapped around his head. The young men did press-ups and other exercises. They had all lived well; this was a pious boy-scout interlude; and the Liward was their camp.

  It seemed that no definite message had come from the holy man about the time of his arrival. The pilgrims took no chances. They drove off to meet every aeroplane from Delhi, leaving behind the epicene young men in saffron robes who, fatigued at last by their idleness, began to indulge in what I at first regarded as a type of child’s play. Gathering whatever material they could find they constructed, with slow, silent intensity, a rough barricade around the cooking stones on the lawn. But they were not playing: they were protecting their food from the gaze of the unclean. This was not all. The turf had been trodden on by numberless unclean people: the turf had therefore to be torn up. And it was this that the squatting saffron-robed vandals were now silently doing.

  I sent for Aziz. Since the arrival of the pilgrims we had not had a confrontation. His face was small. He had seen. He had done more: he had provided a plank which the saffron robes, following a logic of their own, had laid over the mud they had instantly created. What could he do? He spoke of Mr Butt’s need for money; he said that God sent customers. He said that they were a holy group and that the holy man, who was expected any day, was almost a saint.

  The pilgrims brought the holy man back that afternoon; and the atmosphere of arrogant, belching disorder was replaced by one of silent, self-important servitude, brisk scuttlings-about here, conspiratorial whispers there. The holy man sat in a chair below the awning. From time to time women, as though unable to hold themselves in any longer, ran to the holy man and flung themselves before his chair. The holy man barely acknowledged them. But most of the pilgrims simply sat and stared. He was, in truth, finer than any of his admirers. His saffron robe revealed a well-built body of a smooth, warm brown; there was no touch of sensuality in his firm, regular face, which might have been that of a business executive.

  Behind their barricade the saffron-robed disciples were preparing their master’s meal. When this was eaten, and when the pilgrims, sitting in two silent rows on the lawn, had eaten, it was dusk, and the holy man led them all in devotional song. Two men washed the holy man’s robe; then, holding two corners each, they waved it in the air until it was dry.

  I went over to the kitchen, for comfort, and found them all huddled and subdued around the hookah.

  ‘To them we are all unclean,’ a boatman said. ‘Isn’t it a cruel religion?’

  I recognized the Radio Pakistan phrase. But even the boatman clearly held the holy man in awe and didn’t speak above a whisper.

  In the morning the lawn had been dug up some more; the area of mud had spread; and the pilgrims, blither than ever, were shelling peas and cooking and belching and spitting toothpaste on the water-lilies and bathing and washing clothes and running up and down the steps.

  At breakfast I asked Ali Mohammed, ‘When are they leaving?’

  He misunderstood my reason for asking. He smiled, baring his ill-fitting dentures, and said, ‘Big sadhu say last night, “I like this place. I feel I like this place. I stay here five days. I stay here five weeks. I don’t know. I feel I like this place.” ’

  ‘Call Aziz.’

  Aziz came, limply carrying his serving rag. The rag was unclean; he was unclean; we were, indeed, all unclean together.

  ‘Aziz, you tell Mr Butt. Either these people go or we go.’

  Mr Butt came. He looked down at his shoes.

  ‘Hotel is not Western style, Mr Butt. Not Liward Hotel now. Liward Mandir, Liward Temple. I am going to invite Mr Madan to tea today.’

  Aziz knew an empty threat when he heard one. That last sentence had betrayed my helplessness. He at once brightened, flicked his rag about the dining-table and said, ‘When you going Gulmarg, sir?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Butt said. ‘Gulmarg. You take Aziz with.’

  So we compromised. We would go to Gulmarg for a few days.

  ‘But, Mr Butt, if they are still here when we get back, we go for good.’

  ‘That is good, sir.’

  Yet I had it in my power to send the pilgrims and the holy man scuttling out of the hotel in five minutes. I could have revealed to them that that part of the lawn they had dug up for the sake of cleanliness and converted into their kitchen and barricaded lay directly over the hotel’s septic tank.

  *

  ‘Hadn’t we better find out about the times of the Gulmarg buses, Aziz?’

  ‘O no, sahib. Too much bus.’

  We got to the bus station just after eight. Aziz, unfamiliar in big brown shoes (Mr Butt’s), went to buy the tickets.

  ‘We miss eight o’clock bus,’ he said, coming back.

  ‘When is the next one?’

  ‘Twelve o’clock.’

  ‘What are we going to do, Aziz?’

  ‘What we do? We wait.’

  It was a new bus station. Kashmiris, emerging from the gentlemen’s lavatory, wiped their hands on the curtains, which were of a contemporary fabric. A well-dressed beggar woman distributed printed leaflets which told of her tragedy. We waited.

  What was it about Gulmarg that attracted Aziz? It was a holiday settlement of unpainted wooden huts about a small green meadow set in the mountains some three thousand feet above the Valley. On one side the meadow fell away to the Valley through pine forests; on the other it was bounded by higher mountains in the interstices of which, even in August, snow lay in brown drifts. We arrived in rain. At the bungalow of the friends with whom we were going to stay Aziz was at once sent off to the servants’ quarters, and we saw him again only when the rain was over. He was walking back down the muddy road from such centre as the settlement had. His gait was made unusual by the weight of Mr Butt’s shoes. (Mr Butt later reported, almost with emotion, that Aziz had ruined his shoes on this visit.) His smile and greeting were of pure friendliness. ‘How you liking Gulmarg, sir?’

  So far we had seen little. We had seen the mountains lost in black cloud; we had seen the purple flowers on the wet green meadow. We had seen the buildings and foundations of buildings looted and burned by the Pakistanis in 1947: one grand wooden building cracked open from the roof, like a toy, and left derelict, still, with its broken coloured panes and all its noises, a setting for nightmare.

  Had Aziz seen more? Was there an especial friend in Gulmarg? Was there a woman? His moods had been so varied that day. In the morning he had been the efficient hotel servant. At the bus station, settling down for the long wait, he had wiped anticipation off his face, which had grown blank, almost stupefied. In the bus at last, cl
utching the sandwich basket, he had shown a subdued sociability. Then, as soon as he had got on to the pony for the ride through the pines up to Gulmarg, he had become animated and mischievous, bobbing up and down in his saddle, twirling the reins, making clucking noises, racing ahead, riding back, surprising the other ponies into trots. I think it was the ponies of Gulmarg he looked forward to; somewhere in him there must have been the blood of horsemen. On a pony, and even with his shoes on, he ceased to be comic; the loose tapering trousers were right; they were the trousers of a horseman. On our excursions on the following days he never walked when he could ride, even on the steepest, rockiest, nastiest paths; and as long as he was on the back of a pony he remained animated, crying out delightedly when the pony slipped, ‘Oash! Oash! Easy, easy.’ He became talkative. He spoke of the events of 1947 and told of raiders who were so ignorant they took brass for gold. And he told us why he was reluctant to walk. One winter, he said, he had left the service of an employer beyond the Valley; he was without money and had had to cross the snow-covered Banihal Pass on foot. He had fallen ill, and the doctor had forbidden him ever to walk again.

  He seemed to be so many persons. It was especially interesting to watch him at work on our friends, to see applied to others that process of assessment through service to which, in the early days, we ourselves had been subjected. They had servants of their own: nothing bound Aziz to them. Yet he was already taking possession of them; and already he was binding them to himself. He had nothing to gain; he was only obeying an instinct. He could not read or write. People were his material, his profession and no doubt his diversion; his world was made up of these encounters and managed relationships. His responses were acute. (How easily, how ‘officially’, understanding our sentimentality, he had managed the dismissal of the khansamah: ‘This is happy for him’, the khansamah raging impotently behind his back.) He had picked up his English by ear; he therefore avoided Indian eye-pronunciations and spoke the words he knew with a better accent than many college-educated Indians. Even his errors (‘any’ for ‘some’: ‘anybody don’t like ice’) showed his grasp of a language only occasionally heard; and it was astonishing to hear a word or phrase I had used coming back, days later, with my very intonations. Would he have gone far if he had learned to read and write? Wasn’t it his illiteracy which sharpened his perception? He was a handler of people, as in their greater ways rulers of this region, also illiterate, had been: Ranjit Singh of the Sikhs, Gulab Singh, founder of the Jammu and Kashmir State. To us illiteracy is like a missing sense. But to the intelligent illiterate in a simpler world mightn’t literacy be an irrelevance, a dissipation of sensibility, the mercenary skill of the scribe?