Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul - An Area of Darkness

NONFICTION

Between Father and Son: Family Letters
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples
India: A Million Mutinies Now
A Turn in the South
Finding the Center
Among the Believers
The Return of Eva Pern (with The Killings in Trinidad)
India: A Wounded Civilization
The Overcrowded Barracoon
The Loss of El Dorado
The Middle Passage

FICTION

Half a Life
A Way in the World
The Enigma of Arrival
A Bend in the River
Guerrillas
In a Free State
A Flag on the Island*
The Mimic Men
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion*
A House for Mr. Biswas
Miguel Street
The Suffrage of Elvira*
The Mystic Masseur

*Published in an omnibus edition entitled The Nightwatchmans Occurrence Book

T O BE PACKED, after a years journey, before dinner; to have dinner; to be at the airline office at ten, to see the decorative little fountain failed, the wing-shaped counter empty, the tiled turquoise basin of the fountain empty and wetly littered, the lights dim, the glossy magazines disarrayed and disregarded, the Punjabi emigrants sitting disconsolately with their bundles in a corner near the weighing machine; to be at the airport at eleven for an aircraft that leaves at midnight; and then to wait until after three in the morning, intermittently experiencing the horrors of an Indian public lavatory, is to know anxiety, exasperation and a creeping stupor. There comes a point at which the night is written off, and one waits for morning. The minutes lengthen; last night recedes far beyond last night. Lucidity grows intense but blinkered. The actions of minutes before are dim and isolated, and a cause of muted wonder when remembered. So even at the airport India faded; so during these hours its reality was wiped away, until more than space and time lay between it and me.

Paper fell into my lap in the aircraft. Long blond hair and a pair of big blue eyes appeared above the seat in front of me, and tiny feet pattered against the small of my back. Children! cried the American next to me, awakening from middle-aged, safety-belted sleep. Where do they take on all these children? Why are all these children travelling? Whats my crazy luck that every time I go to sleep on a plane and wake up I see children? Shall I tell you a funny thing a friend of mine said to a child on a plane? He said, Sonny, why dont you go outside and play? Little girl, why dont you take your pretty paper and go outside and play? Eyes and hair sank below the dark blue seat. That child behind me is going to get hurt. The little bastard is kicking my kidneys in. Sir! Madam! Will you please control your child? It is annoying my wife. She, the wife, lay relaxed beside him, her skirt riding up above a middle-aged slackly-stockinged knee. There was a smile on her face; she was asleep.

No sleep for me. Only a continuing stupor, heightened by the roar of the engines. I made frequent trips to the lavatory to refresh myself with the airlines eau-de-cologne. The Punjabis at the rear were wakeful, in a ripe smell: one or two had already been sick on the blue carpet. Lights were low. The night was long. We were flying against time, into a receding morning. Yet light was coming; and when at daybreak we reached Beirut it was like arriving, after a magical journey, with all its attendant torment, in a fresh, glittering world. Rain had fallen; the tarmac was glazed and cool. Beyond it was a city which one knew to be a city, full of men as whole as these who, in airport dungarees, now wheeled gangways and drove up in electric lorries to unload luggage: labourers, menials, yet arrogant in their gait, their big bodies and their skills. India was part of the night: a dead world, a long journey.

Rome, the airport, morning still. The Boeings and Caravelles lying this way and that, like toys. And within the airport building a uniformed girl paced up and down the concourse. She wore a jockey-cap hat, to me a new fashion; she wore boots, also new to me. She was extravagantly made up: she required to be noticed. How could I explain, how could I admit as reasonable, even to myself, my distaste, my sense of the insubstantiality and wrongness of the new world to which I had been so swiftly transported? This life confirmed that other death; yet that death rendered this fraudulent.

In the late afternoon I was in Madrid, most elegant of cities. Here I was to spend two or three days. I had been last in this city as a student, ten years before. Here I might have taken up my old life. I was a tourist, free, with money. But a whole experience had just occurred; India had ended only twenty-four hours before. It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two. Write me as soon as you get to Europe, an Indian friend had said. I want your freshest impressions. I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but, like everything I wrote about India, it exorcized nothing.

In my last week in Delhi I had spent some time in the cloth shops, and I had arrived in Madrid with a jacket-length of material in an untied brown parcel printed with Hindi characters. This was the gift of an architect I had known for a short time. Two or three days after we met he had made a declaration of his affection and loyalty, and I had reciprocated. This was part of the sweetness of India; it went with everything else. He had driven me to the airport and had put up with my outbursts at news of the aircrafts delay. We had coffee; then, before he left, he gave me the parcel. Promise me you will have it stitched into a jacket as soon as you get to Europe, he said.

I did so now; and above all the confused impressions of a year, then, was this fresh memory of a friend and his gift of Indian cloth.

Some days later in London, facing as for the first time a culture whose point, going by the advertisements and shop-windows, appeared to be home-making, the creation of separate warm cells; walking down streets of such cells past gardens left derelict by the hard winter and trying, in vain, to summon up a positive response to this city where I had lived and worked; facing my own emptiness, my feeling of being physically lost, I had a dream.

An oblong of stiff new cloth lay before me, and I had the knowledge that if only out of this I could cut a smaller oblong of specific measurements, a specific section of this cloth, then the cloth would begin to unravel of itself, and the unravelling would spread from the cloth to the table to the house to all matter, until thewhole trick was undone. Those were the words that were with me as I flattened the cloth and studied it for the clues which I knew existed, which I desired above everything else to find, but which I knew I never would.

The world is illusion, the Hindus say. We talk of despair, but true despair lies too deep for formulation. It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And already, with this awareness, in a world where illusion could only be a concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again.

February 1962February 1964