Literary Occasions_ Essays Part 4

True knowledge of geography, and with it a sense of historical wonder, began to come sixteen years after I had left Trinidad, when for two years I worked on a history of the region. For those two years-reading in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the London Library-I lived with the doc.u.ments of our region, seeking to detach the region from big historical "over-views," trying only to understand how my corner of the New World, once indeed new, and capable of developing in any number of ways, had become the place it was.

I saw the Gulf of Paria with the eyes of the earliest explorers and officials: I saw it as an aboriginal Indian lake, busy with canoes, sometimes of war. To those Indians, crossing easily back and forth, Trinidad was Venezuela in small. There was a mighty Caroni river in Venezuela; there was a small Caroni, a stream, in Trinidad. There was a Chaguaramas in Trinidad; there was a Chaguaramas in Venezuela.

Trinidad sat in the mouth of the Orinoco, beyond the "drowned lands" of the delta that Sir Walter Raleigh saw: now a refuge for people from the mainland, now a base for attack. To the Spaniards Trinidad guarded the river that led to El Dorado. When that fantasy faded, all that province of El Dorado-Trinidad and Guiana and the drowned lands-was left to bush. But the Indians were ground down. One day in the British Museum I found out about the name of my birthplace Chaguanas.

Raleigh's last, lunatic raid on "El Dorado" had taken place in 1617. Eight years later the Spaniards were settling accounts with the local Indians. On 12 October 1625 the King of Spain wrote to the Governor of Trinidad: "I asked you to give me some information about a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you say are above one thousand and of such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they captured the town. Their crime hasn't been punished because forces were not available for this purpose and because the Indians acknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know how you get on."

I felt that I was the first person since the seventeenth century to whom that doc.u.ment had spoken directly. A small tribe, one among hundreds-they had left behind only their name. The Chaguanas I knew was an Indian country town, Indian of India. Hindi-speaking Indians had simplified the name into a Hindu caste name, Chauhan. It had its Hindu districts and its Muslim districts; it had the religious and caste rivalries of India. It was where my mother's father had bought many acres of cane-land and rice-land and where he had built his Indian-style house. It was also where, from a reading of my father's stories of village life, I had set my fantasy of home, my fantasy of things as they were at the very beginning: the ritualized day, fields and huts, the mango tree in the yard, the simple flowers, the lighting of fires in the evening.

Trinidad I knew too well. It was, profoundly, part of my past. That past lay over the older past; and I couldn't, when I was in Trinidad again, see it as the setting of the aboriginal history I knew and had written about. But I had written about Venezuela and its waters without having seen them. The historical Venezuela-as it existed in my imagination-was vivid to me. And, when I went on to Venezuela from Trinidad in 1977, all that I saw as the aeroplane tilted away from the island was fresh and hallowed, the land and sea of the earliest travellers: the great froth-fringed stain of the Orinoco on the Gulf, the more local, muddier stains of small rivers from the Paria Peninsula (the unexplained peninsula in the left-hand corner of the school map of Trinidad). In 1604, sixteen years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada he had led against England, the Duke of Medina Sidonia had been sent here by the King of Spain, to report on the best way of defending this coast and especially the salt-pans of Araya (into which the Paria Peninsula ran, after 150 miles). Such a task! (And, when I got to know it later, such a desolation still, Araya, on its Caribbean coast: thorn trees and cactus in a hummocked red desert beside the murky sea, life only in the long, slack waves, the vultures in the sky, and the pelicans, all beak and belly and wings, undisturbed on their rock-perches.) To land at La Guaira airport, on the Venezuelan coast, was to come down to a different country. Scores of bulldozers were levelling the red earth to extend the airport. There were yachts in the marina beside the big resort hotel. The highway that led to Caracas in its inland valley had for stretches been tunnelled through the mountains.

Venezuela was rich. But in its oil economy many of its people were superfluous. The restaurants of the capital were Spanish or Italian, the hotels American. The technicians in the industrial towns that were being built in the interior were European; people spoke of a second Spanish conquest. Oil money-derived from foreign machines, foreign markets-fed a real-estate boom in the towns. Agriculture was neglected; it was like something from the poor past. The descendants of the people who had been brought in long ago to restock the Indian land, to work the plantations, were no longer needed. Still pure negro in the cocoa areas (fragrant with the scent of vanilla), old mulatto mixtures elsewhere, they had been abandoned with the plantations. And to travel out to the countryside was to see-on a continental scale-a kind of peasant dereliction that had vanished from Trinidad: shacks and a few fruit trees in small yards, rough little road-side stalls offering fruit from the yards.

It was in a setting like that, on the island of Margarita, in a setting close to what he had known in Trinidad, when I had painted the sign for him at Carenage, that I found Bogart.

Columbus had given Margarita its name, "the pearl." It was across the sea from Araya, and early maps magnified its size. Pearl diving had used up the Indians fast; and there were no pearls now. Margarita lived as a resort island and a duty-free zone: Venezuelans flew over from the mainland to shop. Half the island was desert, as red as Araya; half was green.

Bogart was in the green part. I had imagined, because I had understood he was in the import-export business, that he would be in one of the little towns. He was in a village, far from town or beach. It took some finding-and then suddenly in mid-afternoon, a glaring, shadowless time, in a dusty rural lane, very local, with no sign of resort life or duty-free activity, I was there: little houses, corrugated-iron shacks, open yards, fruit trees growing out of blackened, trampled earth, their promise of a little bounty adding (to me, who had known such places as a child) to the feeling of dirt and poverty and empty days.

Bogart's shop was a little concrete-walled building. Without the big sign painted on the wall I might have missed it. The two brown doors of the shop were closed. The side gate to the yard was closed. In the open yard to one side, in an unwalled shed attached as extra living s.p.a.ce to an old, two-roomed wooden house, a bent old woman, not white, not brown, was taking her ease on a wooden bench: kerchiefed, long-skirted, too old now for a siesta, existing at that moment only in a daze of heat, dullness and old age: pans and plates on a table beside her, potted plants on the ground.

I banged for a long time on Bogart's side gate. At last it opened: a mulatto girl of fifteen or sixteen or seventeen held it open. The old woman next door was swaddled in her long skirt; the light, loose frock of this girl was like the merest covering over her hard little body, and she was in slippers, someone at ease, someone at home. She was pale brown, well-fed, with an oval face.

The questioning in her eyes vanished when she saw the taxi in the road. Her demeanour moderated, but only slightly, into that of the servant. She let me in without a word and then seemed to stand behind me. So that any idea that she might be Bogart's daughter left me, and I thought of her as one of the un-needed, one of the many thousands littered in peasant yards and cast out into the wilderness of Venezuela.

The dirt yard over which the girl had walked in slippers was smooth and swept. At the back of the shop, and at a right angle to it, was a row of two or three rooms with a wide verandah all the way down. From one of these rooms Bogart soon appeared, dressing fast: I had interrupted his siesta. So that, though he was now a man of sixty or more, he was as I had remembered him: heavy-lidded, sleepy. He used to have a smoothness of skin and softness of body that suggested he might become fat. He still had the skin and the softness, but he hadn't grown any fatter.

He called me by the name used by my family. I had trouble with his. I had grown up calling him by the Hindi word for a maternal uncle. That didn't seem suitable now; but I couldn't call him by his name either. In that moment of greeting and mutual embarra.s.sment the girl disappeared.

He had got my telegram, he said; and he had sent a telegram in reply-but I hadn't got that. He didn't ask me into any of the back rooms or even the verandah. He opened up the back door of the shop. He seated me facing the dark shop-stocked mainly with cloth. He sat facing the bright yard. Even after twenty-seven years, I clearly wasn't to stay long.

His voice was gruffer, but there was no trace of Venezuela in his English accent. The light from the yard showed his puffy, sagging cheeks and the black interstices of his teeth. That mouthful of apparently rotten teeth weakened his whole face and gave a touch of inanity to his smile.

His subject, after routine family inquiries, was himself. He never asked what I had done with my life, or even what I was doing in Venezuela. Like many people who live in small or r.e.t.a.r.ded communities, he had little curiosity. His own life was his only story. But that was what I wanted to hear.

When he was a young man, during the war, he said, he had made a trip to Venezuela. He had become involved with a local woman. To his great alarm, she had had a child for him.

Bogart said, "But you knew that."

I didn't know it. Nothing had been said about Bogart's misadventure. Our family kept its secrets well.

For some years after that he had divided his time between Trinidad and Venezuela, freedom and the woman. Finally-since there was no job for him in Trinidad-he had settled in Venezuela. He had got a job with an oil company, and there he had stayed. That was the let-down for me: that Bogart, the adventurer, with his own idea of the Spanish Main, should have lived a life of routine for twenty-five years. He would still have been in that job, he said, if it hadn't been for a malevolent negro. The negro, raised to a little authority and rendered vicious, tormented him. In the end Bogart left the job, with a reduced gratuity. He was glad to leave. That life hadn't really been satisfactory, he said. The woman hadn't been satisfactory. His children had been a disappointment; they were not bright.

Not bright! This judgment, from Bogart! It was astonis.h.i.+ng that he could go back to an old way of thinking, that he could create this picture of his Venezuelan family as mulatto nondescripts. But he was also saying, obliquely, that he had left his wife and children on the mainland and had come to the island to make a fresh start. That explained the confusion about the two addresses. It also explained the demeanour of the mulatto girl, who wasn't allowed to appear again.

He had been part of my luck as a writer; his simplicity had been part of that luck. Even as a child, I had divined his impulses. He wasn't a bigamist, as I had made him in my story. But he had been caught by the senses; and now in old age he was seeking again the liberation he had been looking for when he had come to our street in Port of Spain.

But he was old now. He had begun to have some sense of life as an illusion, and his thoughts were turning to higher things-they had begun to turn that way when he was having trouble with the negro. He didn't know how to pray, he said. He had never paid attention to the pundits-he spoke apologetically, addressing me as someone whose family was full of pundits. But every morning, before he ate, he bathed and sat cross-legged and for half an hour he took the name of Rama-Rama, the Indo-Aryan epic hero, the embodiment of virtue, G.o.d himself, the name Gandhi had spoken twice, after he had been shot.

After telling his story, old family graces seemed to return to Bogart. He hadn't offered hospitality; now he offered anything in his shop. Shoddy goods, for the local market. I took a scarf, synthetic, lightweight material. And then it was close to opening time, and time for me to go.

Outside, I studied the lettering on the shop wall. The paint was new; the sign-writer's rules and pencil outlines were still visible. Perhaps the sign I had done for him twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before had given him the taste for signs. This one was very big. Grandes Rebajas! Aprovechese! Grandes Rebajas! Aprovechese! "Big Reductions! Don't Miss Them!" The Spanish language: no romance in these workaday words now. "Big Reductions! Don't Miss Them!" The Spanish language: no romance in these workaday words now.

He had lived the life of freedom, and it had taken him back almost to where he had been in the beginning. But though he appeared not to know it, the Hindu family life he had wanted to escape from-the life of our extended family, our clan-had disintegrated in Trinidad. The family Bogart had known in my grandmother's house in Port of Spain-neutered men, oppressed and cantankerous women, uneducated children-had scattered, and changed. To everyone there had come the wish to break away; and the disintegration of our private Hindu world-in all, we were fifty cousins-had released energy in people who might otherwise have remained pa.s.sive. Many of my cousins, starting late, acquired professions, wealth; some migrated to more demanding lands.

For all its physical wretchedness and internal tensions, the life of the clan had given us all a start. It had given us a caste certainty, a high sense of the self. Bogart had escaped too soon; still pa.s.sive, he had settled for nullity. Now, discovering his desolation, he was turning to religion, something that he thought was truly his own. He had only memories to guide him. His memories were not of sacred books and texts, but rituals, forms. So he could think only of bathing in the mornings, sitting in a certain posture, and speaking the name of Rama. It was less a wish for religion and old ritual, less a wish for the old life than a wish, in the emptiness of his Venezuela, for the consolation of hallowed ways.

Thinking of him, I remembered something I had seen eight years before in Belize, south of Yucatan, near the great ancient Mayan site of Altun Ha. The site, a complex of temples spread over four square miles, had been abandoned some centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The steep-stepped temples had become forested hills; and in the forest beside the main road there were still many unexcavated small hills, hard to see unless you were looking for them.

The priests of Altun Ha had been killed perhaps a thousand years before; there might have been a peasant uprising. That was the theory of the Canadian archaeologist who was living on the site in a tent marked with the name of his university. Not far away, on the edge of a government camp beside a stream, a Mayan peasant was building a hut. He had put up the pillars-trimmed tree-branches-and the roof-frame. Now he was marking out the boundary of his plot. It was an act that called for some ritual, and the man was walking along the boundary, swinging smoking copal in a wicker censer, and muttering. He was making up his own incantation. The words were gibberish.

When I got back to Caracas I found the telegram Bogart said he had sent me. Sorry but your visit not possible now Am in and out all the time these days It's me alone here in Margarita. Sorry but your visit not possible now Am in and out all the time these days It's me alone here in Margarita.

4.

THE LOCAL history I studied at school was not interesting. It offered so little. It was like the maps in the geography books that stressed the islands and virtually did away with the continent. We were a small part of somebody else's "overview": we were part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story. Perhaps the school histories could be written in no other way. We were, after all, a small agricultural colony; and we couldn't say we had done much. (The current "revolutionary" or Africanist overview is not an improvement: it is no more than the old imperialist att.i.tude turned inside out.) To discover the wonder of our situation as children of the New World we had to look into ourselves; and to someone from my kind of Hindu background that wasn't easy. history I studied at school was not interesting. It offered so little. It was like the maps in the geography books that stressed the islands and virtually did away with the continent. We were a small part of somebody else's "overview": we were part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story. Perhaps the school histories could be written in no other way. We were, after all, a small agricultural colony; and we couldn't say we had done much. (The current "revolutionary" or Africanist overview is not an improvement: it is no more than the old imperialist att.i.tude turned inside out.) To discover the wonder of our situation as children of the New World we had to look into ourselves; and to someone from my kind of Hindu background that wasn't easy.

I grew up with two ideas of history, almost two ideas of time. There was history with dates. That kind of history affected people and places abroad, and my range was wide: ancient Rome (the study of which, during my last two years at Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, was the most awakening part of my formal education); nineteenth-century England; the nationalist movement in India.

But Chaguanas, where I was born, in an Indian-style house my grandfather had built, had no dates. If I read in a book that Gandhi had made his first call for civil disobedience in India in 1919, that date seemed recent. But 1919, in Chaguanas, in the life of the Indian community, was almost unimaginable. It was a time beyond recall, mythical. About our family, the migration of our ancestors from India, I knew only what I knew or what I was told. Beyond (and sometimes even within) people's memories was undated time, historical darkness. Out of that darkness (extending to place as well as to time) we had all come. The India where Gandhi and Nehru and the others operated was historical and real. The India from which we had come was impossibly remote, almost as imaginary as the land of the Ramayana, Ramayana, our Hindu epic. I lived easily with that darkness, that lack of knowledge. I never thought to inquire further. our Hindu epic. I lived easily with that darkness, that lack of knowledge. I never thought to inquire further.

My mother's father had built a big house in Chaguanas. I didn't know when. (It was in 1920; I was given that date in 1972.) He had gone back to India and died-in the life of our family, a mythical event. (It occurred in 1926.) Little by little I understood that this grandfather still had relations in India, that there was a village, with an actual address. My mother, giving me this address in 1961, recited it like poetry: district, sub-district, village.

In 1962, at the end of a year of travel in India, I went to that village. I wasn't prepared for the disturbance I felt, turning off from the India where I had been a traveller, and driving in a government jeep along a straight, dusty road to another, very private world. Two ideas of history came together during that short drive, two ways of thinking about myself.

And there I discovered that to my grandfather this village-the pond, the big trees he would have remembered, the brick dwellings with their enclosed courtyards (unlike the adobe and thatch of Trinidad Indian villages), the fields in the flat land, the immense sky, the white shrines-this village was the real place. Trinidad was the interlude, the illusion.

My grandfather had done well in Trinidad. He had bought much land-I continue to discover "pieces" he had bought; he had bought properties in Port of Spain; he had established a very large family and in our community he had a name. But he was willing, while he was still an active man, to turn his back on this and return home, to the real place. He hadn't gone alone-a family secret suddenly revealed: he had taken another woman with him. But my grandfather hadn't seen his village again; he had died on the train from Calcutta. The woman with him had made her way to the village (no doubt reciting the address I had heard my mother recite). And there for all these years, in the house of my grandfather's brother, she had stayed.

She was very old when I saw her. Her skin had cracked; her eyes had filmed over; she moved about the courtyard on her haunches. She still had a few words of English. She had photographs of our family-things of Trinidad-to show; there remained to her the curious vanity that she knew us all very well.

She had had a great adventure. But her India had remained intact; her idea of the world had remained whole; no other idea of reality had broken through. It was different for thousands of others. In July and August 1932, during my father's first spell on the Trinidad Guardian Trinidad Guardian (and around the time I was born), one of the big running stories in the paper was the repatriation of Indian immigrants on the S.S. (and around the time I was born), one of the big running stories in the paper was the repatriation of Indian immigrants on the S.S. Ganges. Ganges.

Indian immigrants, at the end of their contract, were ent.i.tled to a small grant of land or to a free trip back to India with their families. The promise hadn't always been kept. Many Indians, after they had served out their indenture, had found themselves dest.i.tute and homeless. Such people, even within my memory, slept at night in the Port of Spain squares. Then in 1931 the Ganges Ganges had come, and taken away more than a thousand. Only "paupers" were taken free; everyone else had to pay a small fare. The news, in 1932, that the had come, and taken away more than a thousand. Only "paupers" were taken free; everyone else had to pay a small fare. The news, in 1932, that the Ganges Ganges was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the Ganges Ganges as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad. Many more wanted to go than could be taken on. A thousand left; a quarter were officially "paupers." Seven weeks later the as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad. Many more wanted to go than could be taken on. A thousand left; a quarter were officially "paupers." Seven weeks later the Ganges Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the pa.s.sengers, the reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the pa.s.sengers, the Ganges Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks. was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.

Our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream. Of my mother's father, so important to our family, I grew up knowing very little. Of my father's family and my father's childhood I knew almost nothing. My father's father had died when my father was a baby. My father knew only his mother's stories of this man: a miserly and cruel man who counted every biscuit in the tin, made her walk five miles in the hot sun to save a penny fare, and, days before my father was born, drove her out of the house. My father never forgave his father. He forgave him only in a story he wrote, one of his stories of Indian village life, in which his mother's humiliation is made good by the ritual celebration of the birth of her son.

Another incident I knew about-and my father told this as a joke-was that at one time he had almost gone back to India on an immigrant s.h.i.+p. The family had been "pa.s.sed" for repatriation; they had gone to the immigration depot on Nelson Island. There my father had panicked, had decided that he didn't want to go back to India. He hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind about the trip back to India.

This was what my father pa.s.sed on to me about his family and his childhood. The events were as dateless as the home events of my own confused childhood. His early life seemed an extension back in time of my own; and I did not think to ask until much later for a more connected narrative. When I was at Oxford I pressed him in letters to write an autobiography. This was to encourage him as a writer, to point him to material he had never used. But some deep hurt or shame, something still raw and unresolved in his experience, kept my father from attempting any autobiographical writing. He wrote about other members of his family. He never wrote about himself.

It wasn't until 1972, when I was forty, and nearly twenty years after my father's death, that I got a connected idea of his ancestry and early life.

I was in Trinidad. In a Port of Spain shop one day the Indian boy who sold me a paper said he was related to me. I was interested, and asked him how-the succeeding generations, spreading through our small community, had added so many relations to those I had known. He said, quickly and precisely, that he was the grandson of my father's sister. The old lady was dying, he said. I should try to see her soon. I went the next morning.

Thirty years before, her house in the open country near Chaguanas had been one of the fairytale places my father had taken me to: the thatched hut with its swept yard, its mango tree, its hibiscus hedge, and with fields at the back. My father had written a story about her. But it was a long time before I understood that the story had been about her; that the story-again, a story of ritual and reconciliation-was about her unhappy first marriage; and that her life in that fairytale hut with her second husband, a man of a low, cultivator caste, was wretched.

That was now far in the past. Even the kind of countryside I a.s.sociated with her had vanished, been built over. She was dying in a daughter's house on the traffic-choked Eastern Main Road that led out of Port of Spain, in a cool, airy room made neat both for her death and for visitors. She was attended by children and grandchildren, people of varying levels of education and skill; some had been to Canada. Here, as everywhere else in Trinidad, there had been movement: my father's sister, at the end of her life, could see success.

She was very small, and had always been very thin. Uncovered by blanket or sheet, in a long blue nightdress and a new, white, too-big cardigan, she lay very light, like an object carefully placed, on her spring mattress, over which the sheet had been pulled smooth and tight.

The cardigan, in the tropical morning, was odd. It was like a baby's garment, put on for her by someone else; like a tribute to her death, like the extravagant gift of a devoted daughter; and also like the old lady's last attempt at a joke. Like my father, whom she resembled, she had always been a humorist in a gathering (the gloom, the irritation, came immediately afterwards); and this death chamber was full of chatter and easy movement. There was even a camera; and she posed, willingly. One man, breezing in, sat down so hard on the bed that the old lady b.u.mped up; and it seemed to be one of her jokes.

But her talk to me was serious. It was of caste and blood. When I was a child we hadn't been able to talk. I could follow Hindi but couldn't speak it. She couldn't speak a word of English, though nearly everyone around her was bilingual. She had since picked up a little English; and her death-bed talk, of caste and blood, was in this broken language. The language still strained her, but what she was saying was like her bequest to me. I had known her poor, living with a man of a cultivator caste. She wanted me to know now, before the knowledge vanished with her, what she-and my father-had come from. She wanted me to know that the blood was good.

She didn't talk of her second husband. She talked of the first. He had treated her badly, but what was important about him now was that he was a Punjabi brahmin, a "scholar," she said, a man who could read and write Urdu and Persian. When she spoke of her father, she didn't remember the miserliness and cruelty which my father remembered. She wanted me to know that her father lived in a "galvanize" house-a galvanized-iron roof being a sign of wealth, unlike thatch, which was what had sheltered her for most of her life.

Her father was a pundit, she said. And he was fussy; he didn't like having too much to do with the low. And here-since her face was too old to be moulded into any expression save one of great weariness-the old lady used her shrivelled little hand to make a gentle gesture of disdain. The disdain was for the low among Hindus. My father's sister had spent all her life in Trinidad; but in her caste vision no other community mattered or properly existed.

She took the story back to her father's mother. This was as far as her memory went. And for me it was far enough. With no dates, and no big external events to provide historical markers, I found it hard to hold this relations.h.i.+p in my head. But this story contained many of my father's sister's other stories; and it gave me something like a family history. In one detail it was shocking; but it all came to me as a fairy story. And I shall reconstruct it here as a story-momentarily keeping the characters at a distance.

About 1880, in the ancient town of Ayodhya in the United Provinces in India, a young girl of the Parray clan gave birth to a son. She must have been deeply disgraced, because she was willing to go alone with her baby to a far-off island to which other people of the region were going. That was how the Parray woman came to Trinidad. She intended her son to be a pundit; and in the district of Diego Martin she found a good pundit who was willing to take her son in and instruct him. (There was no hint, in the tale I heard, of sugar estates and barracks and contract labour.) The years pa.s.sed. The boy went out into the world and began to do pundit's work. He also dealt, in a small way, in the goods Hindus used in religious ceremonies. His mother began to look for a bride for him. Women of suitable caste and clan were not easy to find in Trinidad, but the Parray woman had some luck. It happened that three brothers of a suitable clan had made the journey out from India together, and it happened that one of these brothers had seven daughters.

The Parray boy married one of these daughters. They had three children, a girl and two boys. They lived in the village of Cunupia, not far from Chaguanas, in a house with adobe walls and a galvanized-iron roof. Quite suddenly, when the youngest child, a boy, was only two, the young Parray fell ill and died. Somehow all the gold coins he had h.o.a.rded disappeared; and the aunts and uncles thought the children and their mother should be sent back to India. Arrangements were made, but then at the last moment the youngest child didn't want to go. He ran away and hid in a latrine, and the s.h.i.+p sailed without them.

The family was scattered. The eldest child, a girl, worked in the house of a relative; she never learned to read or write. The elder boy went out to work on the sugar estates for eight cents a day. The younger boy was spared for school. He was sent to stay with his mother's sister, who had married a man who owned a shop and was starting a bus company. The boy went to school by day and worked until late at night in the shop.

The Parray woman lived on for some time, mourning her pundit son, whom she had brought from India as a baby. She always wore white for grief, and she became known in the country town of Chaguanas: a very small, even a dwarfish, woman with white hair and a pale complexion. She walked with a stick, and pa.s.sed for a witch. Children mocked her; sometimes, as she approached, people drew the sign of the cross on the road.

The Parray woman was my father's grandmother. The Parray man who died young was my father's father. The elder boy who went out to work in the cane-fields became a small farmer; when he was old he would cry at the memory of those eight cents a day. The younger boy who was spared for school-in order that he might become a pundit and so fufil the family destiny-was my father.

It is only in this story that I find some explanation of how, coming from that background, with little education and little English, in a small agricultural colony where writing was not an occupation, my father developed the ambition to be a writer. It was a version of the pundit's vocation. When I got to know my father-in Port of Spain, in 1938, when he was thirty-two and I was six-he was a journalist. I took his occupation for granted. It was years before I worked back to a proper wonder at his achievement.

5.

THE MANAGING editor of the editor of the Trinidad Guardian Trinidad Guardian from 1929 to April 1934 was Gault MacGowan. I heard his name often when I was a child: he was the good man who had helped in the early days, and I was told that I had been shown to him as a baby one day in Chaguanas. from 1929 to April 1934 was Gault MacGowan. I heard his name often when I was a child: he was the good man who had helped in the early days, and I was told that I had been shown to him as a baby one day in Chaguanas.

The Hindu who wants to be a pundit has first to find a guru. My father, wanting to learn to write, found MacGowan. It was MacGowan, my father said, who had taught him how to write; and all his life my father had for MacGowan the special devotion which the Hindu has for his guru. Even when I was at Oxford my father, in his letters to me, was pa.s.sing on advice he had received twenty years before from MacGowan. In 1951 he wrote: "And as to a writer being hated or liked-I think it's the other way to what you think: a man is doing his work well when people begin liking liking him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: 'Write sympathetically'; and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly." him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: 'Write sympathetically'; and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly."

MacGowan seems to have understood the relations.h.i.+p. In a letter he wrote me out of the blue in 1963, nearly thirty years after he had left Trinidad-a letter of pure affection, written to me as my father's son-MacGowan, then nearly seventy, living in Munich and "still publis.h.i.+ng," said he had always been interested in the people of India. He had found my father willing to learn, and had gone out of his way to instruct him.

An unlikely bond between the two men was a mischievous sense of humour. "Trinidad Hangman Disappointed-Robbed of Fee by Executive Council-Bitter Regret." That was a MacGowan headline over a news item about a condemned man's reprieve. It was the kind of joke my father also relished. That particular headline was brought up in court, as an example of MacGowan's irresponsibility, during one of the two big court cases MacGowan had in Trinidad. MacGowan said, "Doesn't the headline tell the story? I think that just the word 'robbed' is out of place." Publicity like this wasn't unwelcome to MacGowan. He seems to have been litigious, and as a Fleet Street man he had the Fleet Street idea that a newspaper should every day in some way be its own news.

He had been brought out from England to Trinidad, on the recommendation of The Times, The Times, to modernize the to modernize the Trinidad Guardian. Trinidad Guardian. The The Port of Spain Gazette, Port of Spain Gazette, founded in 1832, and representing French creole planter and business interests, was the established local paper. The founded in 1832, and representing French creole planter and business interests, was the established local paper. The Guardian, Guardian, started in 1917, and representing other business interests, was floundering a long way behind. Its make-up was antiquated: on the front page a rectangle of closely printed news cables was set in a big frame of shop advertis.e.m.e.nts. started in 1917, and representing other business interests, was floundering a long way behind. Its make-up was antiquated: on the front page a rectangle of closely printed news cables was set in a big frame of shop advertis.e.m.e.nts.

MacGowan changed the front page. He gave the Guardian Guardian a London look. He had a London feeling for international news ("Daily at Dawn-Last Night's News in London"). And to the affairs of multi-racial Trinidad he brought what, in local journalism, was absolutely new: a tourist's eye. Everything was worth looking at; there was a story in almost everything. And there were real excitements: French fugitives from Devil's Island, voodoo in negro backyards, Indian obeah, Venezuelan vampire bats (at one time the a London look. He had a London feeling for international news ("Daily at Dawn-Last Night's News in London"). And to the affairs of multi-racial Trinidad he brought what, in local journalism, was absolutely new: a tourist's eye. Everything was worth looking at; there was a story in almost everything. And there were real excitements: French fugitives from Devil's Island, voodoo in negro backyards, Indian obeah, Venezuelan vampire bats (at one time the Guardian Guardian saw them flying about in daylight everywhere, and this concern with bats was to get both MacGowan and my father into trouble). Every community interested MacGowan. The Indians of the countryside were cut off by language, religion and culture from the rest of the colonial population. MacGowan became interested in them-as material, and also as potential readers. saw them flying about in daylight everywhere, and this concern with bats was to get both MacGowan and my father into trouble). Every community interested MacGowan. The Indians of the countryside were cut off by language, religion and culture from the rest of the colonial population. MacGowan became interested in them-as material, and also as potential readers.

It was as an Indian voice, a reforming, "controversial" Indian voice ("Trinidad Indians Are Not Sincere"), that my father began to appear in MacGowan's Guardian, Guardian, doing an occasional column signed "The Pundit." My feeling now is that these columns must have been rewritten by MacGowan, or (though my mother says no) that some of the material was plagiarized by my father from the reformist Hindu literature he had begun to read. doing an occasional column signed "The Pundit." My feeling now is that these columns must have been rewritten by MacGowan, or (though my mother says no) that some of the material was plagiarized by my father from the reformist Hindu literature he had begun to read.

But a relations.h.i.+p was established between the two men. And my father-at a starting salary of four dollars a week-began to do reporting. There the voice was his own, the knowledge of Trinidad Indian life was his own; and the zest-for news, for the drama of everyday life, for human oddity-the zest for looking with which MacGowan infected him became real. He developed fast.

Even when there was no news, there could be news. "Chaguanas Man Writes Lindbergh-'I Know Where Your Baby Is.'" "Indians Pray for Gandhi-Despair in Chaguanas."

It must have been MacGowan who suggested to my father that everybody had a story. Was that really so? Not far from my mother's family house in Chaguanas was the railway crossing. Twice or four times a day an old one-armed negro closed and opened the gates. Did that man have a story? The man himself didn't seem to think so. He lived in absolute harmony with the long vacancies of his calling, and the brightest thing about my father's piece was MacGowan's headline: "Thirty-six Years of Watching a Trinidad Railway Gate."

More rewarding was the Indian shopkeeper a couple of houses down on the other side of the road. He was a man of the merchant caste who had come out to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. Field labour, and especially "heading" manure, carrying baskets of manure on his head, like untouchables in India, had been a humiliation and a torment to him. In the beginning he had cried at night; and sometimes his day's "task" so wore him out that he couldn't cook his evening meal. Once he had eaten a piece of sugar-cane in the field, and he had been fined a dollar, almost a week's wage. But he had served out his five-year indenture, and his caste instincts had rea.s.serted themselves. He had made money as a merchant and was soon to build one of the earliest cinemas in the countryside. It was a good story; in Trinidad at that time, only my father could have done it.

MacGowan increased the circulation of the Guardian. Guardian. But the directors of the paper had other local business interests as well, and they felt that MacGowan was damaging these interests. MacGowan, fresh from the depression in England, wanted to run a "Buy British" campaign; the chairman of the But the directors of the paper had other local business interests as well, and they felt that MacGowan was damaging these interests. MacGowan, fresh from the depression in England, wanted to run a "Buy British" campaign; the chairman of the Guardian Guardian directors owned a trading company which dealt in American goods. The chairman had land at Macqueripe Bay; MacGowan campaigned for a road to Maracas Bay, where the chairman had no land. Some of the directors had invested in tourist ventures; MacGowan was running stories in the directors owned a trading company which dealt in American goods. The chairman had land at Macqueripe Bay; MacGowan campaigned for a road to Maracas Bay, where the chairman had no land. Some of the directors had invested in tourist ventures; MacGowan was running stories in the Guardian Guardian about "mad bats" that flew about in daylight, and his cables to about "mad bats" that flew about in daylight, and his cables to The Times The Times and and New York Times New York Times about vampire bats and a special Trinidad form of rabies were said to be frightening away cruise s.h.i.+ps. about vampire bats and a special Trinidad form of rabies were said to be frightening away cruise s.h.i.+ps.

Paralytic rabies was, in fact, killing cattle in Trinidad at this time. And for all the playfulness of his "mad bat" campaign ("Join the Daylight Bat Hunt-Be First"), MacGowan was acting on good advice. A local French creole doctor had recently established the link between bats and paralytic rabies, and was experimenting with a vaccine; the work of this doctor, Pawan, was soon to be acknowledged in text books of tropical medicine. But the Guardian Guardian chairman, who said later he had never heard of anyone in Trinidad dying from a bat bite, decided that MacGowan had to go. chairman, who said later he had never heard of anyone in Trinidad dying from a bat bite, decided that MacGowan had to go.

MacGowan couldn't be sacked; he had his contract. He could, however, be attacked; and the editor of the Port of Spain Gazette, Port of Spain Gazette, whom MacGowan had often satirized, was only too willing to help. "Scaremongering MacGowan Libels Trinidad in Two Continents": this was a headline in the whom MacGowan had often satirized, was only too willing to help. "Scaremongering MacGowan Libels Trinidad in Two Continents": this was a headline in the Gazette Gazette one day. MacGowan sued and won. Journalistically, the case was also a triumph: the one day. MacGowan sued and won. Journalistically, the case was also a triumph: the Guardian Guardian and its editor had become serious news in both papers. It was even better journalism when MacGowan sued the and its editor had become serious news in both papers. It was even better journalism when MacGowan sued the Guardian Guardian chairman for slander. For three weeks, in a realization of a Fleet Street ideal, the chairman for slander. For three weeks, in a realization of a Fleet Street ideal, the Guardian Guardian became its own big news, with the chairman, the editor and the editor's journalistic style getting full-page treatment day after day. But MacGowan lost the case. And all Trinidad knew what until then had been known only to a few: that at the end of his contract MacGowan would be leaving. became its own big news, with the chairman, the editor and the editor's journalistic style getting full-page treatment day after day. But MacGowan lost the case. And all Trinidad knew what until then had been known only to a few: that at the end of his contract MacGowan would be leaving.

MacGowan left. My father stayed behind. He became disturbed, fell ill, lost his job, and was idle and dependent for four years. In 1938, in the house of my mother's mother in Port of Spain, he came fully into my life for the first time. And in his clippings book, an old estate wages ledger, I came upon his relics of his heroic and hopeful time with MacGowan.

This was, very roughly, what I knew when, two years after I had written about Bogart and the life of the street, I thought of reconstructing the life of someone like my father. I had changed flats in London; and my mind went back to 1938, to my discovery of the few pieces of furniture which my father had brought with him to Port of Spain, the first furniture I had thought of as mine. I wanted to tell the story of the life as the story of the acquiring of those simple, precious pieces. The book took three years to write. It changed; and the writing changed me. I was writing about things I didn't know; and the book that came out was very much my father's book. It was written out of his journalism and stories, out of his knowledge, knowledge he had got from the way of looking MacGowan had trained him in. It was written out of his writing.

The book was read some years later-in Moscow-by a New York Times New York Times writer, Israel Shenker. In 1970, in London, he interviewed me for his paper; he was doing a series on writers. Some weeks later he sent me a copy of a clipping from the writer, Israel Shenker. In 1970, in London, he interviewed me for his paper; he was doing a series on writers. Some weeks later he sent me a copy of a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune New York Herald Tribune of 24 June 1933, and asked for my comments. of 24 June 1933, and asked for my comments.

REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY.

HINDU G.o.dDESS.

Writer Kowtows to Kali to Escape Black Magic Death

Port of Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies. June 23 (CP). Threatened with death by the Hindu G.o.ddess Kali, Seepersad Naipaul, native writer, today offered a goat as sacrifice to appease the anger of the G.o.ddess. Threatened with death by the Hindu G.o.ddess Kali, Seepersad Naipaul, native writer, today offered a goat as sacrifice to appease the anger of the G.o.ddess.

Naipaul wrote newspaper articles revealing that native farmers of Hindu origin had defied government regulations for combating cattle diseases and had been subst.i.tuting ancient rites of the G.o.ddess Kali to drive away the illness attacking their livestock.

The writer was told he would develop poisoning tomorrow, die on Sunday, and be buried on Monday unless he offered a goat sacrifice. Today he yielded to the entreaty of friends and relatives and made the demanded sacrifice.

I was staggered. I had no memory of this incident. I had read nothing about it in my father's ledger. I had heard nothing about it from my father or mother or anybody else. All that I remembered was that my father had a special horror of the Kali cult; and that he had told me once, with one of his rages about the family, that my mother's mother had been a devotee of Kali.

I wrote to Shenker that the story was probably one of MacGowan's joke stories, with my father trying to make himself his own news. That was what I believed, and the matter went to the back of my mind.

Two years later, when I was in Trinidad, I went to look at the Guardian Guardian file in the Port of Spain newspaper library. To me, until then, in spite of education, writing and travel, everything connected with my family past had seemed irrecoverable, existing only in fading memory. (All my father's doc.u.ments, even his ledger, had been lost.) file in the Port of Spain newspaper library. To me, until then, in spite of education, writing and travel, everything connected with my family past had seemed irrecoverable, existing only in fading memory. (All my father's doc.u.ments, even his ledger, had been lost.) Here were printed records. Here, in the sequence in which they had fallen in the mornings on the front steps of the Port of Spain house, were the Guardian Guardians of 1938 and 1939, once looked at without being understood: the photographs of scholars.h.i.+p winners (such lucky men), the sports pages (with the same, often-used photographs of great cricketers), the cinema advertis.e.m.e.nts that had awakened such longing (Bobby Breen in Rainbow on the River Rainbow on the River).

And then, going back, I rediscovered parts of my father's ledger. I found that the ledger I had grown up with was not complete. My father had left out some things. The clipping Shenker had sent me told a true story. It was a bigger story than I had imagined, and it was not comic at all. It was the story of a great humiliation. It had occurred just when my father was winning through to a kind of independence, and had got started in his vocation. The independence was to go within months. The vocation-in a colonial Trinidad, without MacGowan-was to become meaningless; the vacancy was to be with my father for the rest of his life.