An Area of Darkness

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  When a crisis occurs, as during the Chinese invasion, the symbolic nature of the structure is made plain. Speeches are made and reported at length. Many gestures – the woman Minister of Health giving blood, somebody else giving jewellery – are given publicity. Various services are suspended. Then no one seems to know what to do next. Perhaps a Defence of the Realm Act? Dora, everyone calls it, adding a comforting familiarity to a correct label; and for a few days it is spoken like a magic word. The British proclaimed Dora in 1939. Now the Indian Government does the same. The British dug trenches. So they dig trenches in Delhi, but only symbolically, here and there, and dangerously, in public parks, below trees. The trenches answer the insatiable Indian need for open-air latrines. And, needless to say, supplies for the army, symbolically armed, find their way to the Calcutta open market.

  *

  An eastern conception of dignity and function, reposing on symbolic action: this is the dangerous, decayed pragmatism of caste. Symbolic dress, symbolic food, symbolic worship: India deals in symbols, inaction. Inaction arising out of proclaimed function, function out of caste. Untouchability is not the most important effect of the system; a Western conception of dignity alone has made it so. But at the heart of the system lies the degradation of the latrine-cleaner, and that casual defecation in a veranda which Gandhi observed in 1901.

  ‘The moment untouchability goes the caste system will be purified.’ It sounds like a piece of Gandhian and Indian doublethink. It might even be interpreted as a recognition of the inevitability of caste. But it is a revolutionary assessment. Land reform does not convince the brahmin that he can put his hand to the plough without disgrace. Making awards to children for bravery does not lessen the feeling that it is unpardonable to risk one’s life to save another. Reserving government jobs for untouchables helps nobody. It places responsibility in the hands of the unqualified; and the position of untouchable civil servants, whose reputations always go before them, is intolerable. It is the system that has to be regenerated, the psychology of caste that has to be destroyed. So Gandhi comes again and again to the filth and excrement of India, the dignity of latrine-cleaning; the spirit of service; bread-labour. From the West his message looks limited and cranky; but it is only that to a concerned colonial vision of India he is applying Western simplicities.

  India undid him. He became a mahatma. He was to be reverenced for what he was; his message was irrelevant. He roused India to all her ‘formless spirituality’; he awakened all the Indian passion for self-abasement in the presence of the virtuous, self-abasement of which the Kama Sutra would have approved, since it ensured a man’s prospects in the other world, did not encourage him to any prolonged and difficult labour, and was withal pleasant. Symbolic action was the curse of India. Yet Gandhi was Indian enough to deal in symbols. So, latrine-cleaning became an occasional ritual, virtuous because sanctioned by the great-souled; the degradation of the latrine-cleaner continued. The spinning-wheel did not dignify labour; it was only absorbed into the great Indian symbolism, its significance rapidly fading. He remains a tragic paradox. Indian nationalism grew out of Hindu revivalism; this revivalism, which he so largely encouraged, made his final failure certain. He succeeded politically because he was reverenced; he failed because he was reverenced. His failure is there, in his writings: he is still the best guide to India. It is as if, in England, Florence Nightingale had become a saint, honoured by statues everywhere, her name on every lip; and the hospitals had remained as she had described them.

  His failure is deeper. For nothing so shakes up the Indian in order that he might be made more securely static, nothing so stultifies him and robs him of his habitual grace, as the possession of a holy man.

  ‘Is this the train for Delhi?’ I cried to a peasant group, bounding, with seconds to spare, into a compartment at Moradabad station.

  ‘Where on earth do you think you are? Speak Hindi if you want an answer. Hindi alone here.’

  This was from the head of the group. He was not a nationalist, propagating the national language. At any other time he would have been civil and even deferential. But now he was the possessor of a saffron-clad holy man, fat and sleek and oily – there is little subtlety to India – before whom the women and children of the group were abasing themselves.

  It is so with Indians and Gandhi. He is the latest proof of their spirituality; he strengthens the private contract with God of all who revere him. Nothing remains of Gandhi in India but this: his name and the worship of his image; the seminars about nonviolence, as though this was all he taught; prohibition, rich in symbolism and righteousness, proclaimed as a worthy goal even at the height of the China crisis; and the politician’s garb.

  Observe this village politician, austerely and correctly clad, speaking of the mahatma and the motherland at a country meeting.

  ‘To get elected,’ the Indian Administrative Service officer tells me, ‘that man had seventeen people murdered.’

  There is no inconsistency; the mahatma has been absorbed into the formless spirituality and decayed pragmatism of India. The revolutionary became a god and his message was thereby lost. He failed to communicate to India his way of direct looking. And strange: in twelve months I could find no one among his ordinary worshippers who could tell me exactly what he looked like. It was not a question to put to Indians, who have no descriptive gift, but the replies were astonishing. For some he was tiny; for one man in Madras he was six feet tall. For some he was dark; for some he was exceedingly fair. Yet all remembered him; many even had personal photographs. These did not help: the image was too familiar. So it is when legends are complete. Nothing can add to them or take away from them. The image is fixed, simplified, unalterable; witness is of no account. Nearly every word Gandhi spoke and wrote is recorded; the Gandhi bibliography is immense. But in India he has already receded; he might have lived in the days when scribes wrote on leaves and strips of brass and people travelled on foot.

  4. Romancers

  THE TITLES OF Indian films never ceased to attract me. They were straightforward, but they held infinite suggestion. Private Secretary: in India, where adventure of the sort implied was limited, where kisses were barred from the screen, the mind could play with such a title: the ‘progressive’ girl, the attractive office job (typewriter, white telephone), the mixing of the sexes; irregular love; family life threatened; tragedy. I never saw the film. I saw only the poster: a body, if I remember rightly, lay on an office floor. Junglee (untamed) was another title: a woman against a background of Himalayan snow. For Maya (cosmic illusion, vanity) a woman was shown weeping big, bitter tears. Jhoola (the swing) promised gaiety, many songs and dances. Then, as sinister in suggestion as Private Secretary, Paying Guest.

  We were paying guests. It was in Delhi, the city of symbols, first of the British Raj and now of the independent Indian republic: a jungle of black-and-white notice boards mushrooming out of feverish administrative activity, the Indian Council for this and Academy for that, the Ministry for this and the Department for that, the buildings going up all the time, monstrous bird’s nests of bamboo scaffolding: a city ever growing, as it has been for the last forty years, a city of civil servants and contractors. We were paying guests; and our host was Mrs Mahindra, the wife of a contractor.

  She sent her car to meet us at the railway station. It was an attention we were grateful for. To step out of the third-class air-conditioned coach on to the smooth hot platform was to feel one’s shirt instantly heated, to lose interest, to wonder with a dying flicker of intellectual curiosity why anyone in India bothered, why anyone had bothered with India. On that platform, oven-dry, competitive activity was yet maintained. The porters, blazing in red tunics and red turbans, hustled about screeching for custom. The successful staggered beneath metal trunks sprayed with fine dust after the journey from Bombay: one trunk, two trunks, three trunks. The fans spun frenziedly above us. The beggars whined. The man from the Bhagirath Hotel waved his grubby folder. Remembering that for antarct
ic explorers surrender was easy and that the enduring, the going on, was the act of bravery, I reached out for the folder and, standing in the midst of noise and activity in which I had lost interest and which now seemed to swing outwards from me in waves, I read with slow concentration, in which everything was distorted and dissolving:

  Arrive a Delhi au terme d’un equisant voyage, c’est avec le plus grand plaisir que j’ai pris le meilleur des repos au Bahgirath Hotel, dant les installations permettent de se remettre de ses fetigues dans un cadre agreable. J’ai particulierment apprecie la gentillesse et l’hospitolite de le direction et do personnel. Je ne peploie q’ue chose, c’est de n’avoir pu arroser les excellents repos des baissens alcoolirees aux quelles nous mettent le cour en joie. 28–7–61 Fierre Bes Georges, Gareme (Seine) France

  Baissens alcoolirees: yearning had glided into delirium. Et Monsieur, qu’est-ce-qu-il peploie? Je ne peploie q’ue chose. Arrosez les excellents repos. On the shining concrete the figures were stretched out, Indian sleepers on an Indian railway station. The unemployed porters squatted. The beggar woman, whining, even she squatted. Arrosez les excellent repos. But there were no fountains. The streets were wide and grand, the roundabouts endless: a city built for giants, built for its vistas, for its symmetry: a city which remained its plan, unquickened and unhumanized, built for people who would be protected from its openness, from the whiteness of its light, to whom the trees were like the trees on an architect’s drawing, decorations, not intended to give shade: a city built like a monument. And everything labelled, as on an architect’s drawing; every moving thing dwarfed, the man on his bicycle, with his black, black shadow; an endless, ever-spreading city which encouraged no repose, which sent people scuttling through its avenues and malls, as these scooter-rickshaws scuttled noisily in and out of the traffic, shrunk to less than human size in the presence of the monumental city.

  The house was in one of the New Delhi ‘colonies’ or residential settlements, abrupt huddles of fantasy and riotous modern lines after the exposed austerity of the centre. It was as though an Indian village had been transformed into concrete and glass, and magnified. The houses were not yet coherently numbered; and the narrow nameless lanes were full of bewildered Sikhs seeking houses by plot numbers, whose sequence was chronological, indicating date of purchase. Dust; concrete white and grey; no trees; each Sikh attached to a brisk, black shadow.

  We sat in front of an empty, unsmoked fireplace below an electric fan and rested with glasses of Coca-Cola.

  ‘Duffer, that Bihari boy,’ Mrs Mahindra said, apologizing for her chauffeur and making conversation.

  She was plump, still young, with large staring eyes. She had little English, and when words failed her she gave a giggle and looked away. She said Mm, her eyes became vacant, and her right hand went to her chin.

  The house was new and on this ground floor smelled of concrete and paint. The rooms were not yet fully decorated; the furnishings were sparse. But there were fans everywhere; and the bathroom fittings, from Germany, were rare and expensive. ‘I am craze for foreign,’ Mrs Mahindra said. ‘Just craze for foreign.’

  She marvelled at our suitcases and at what they contained. She fingered with reverence and delight.

  ‘Craze, just craze for foreign.’

  Widening her eyes, it might have been in fear, it might have been in admiration, she told us of her husband, the contractor. He had a hard life. He was always travelling about in forests and jungles and living in tents. She had to stay behind and do the housekeeping.

  ‘Three thousand rupees a month allowance. These days cost-of-living that-is-no-joke.’

  She was not really boasting. She came from a simple family and she accepted her new wealth as she would have accepted poverty. She was anxious to learn, anxious to do the correct thing, anxious for our foreign approval. Did we like the colours of her curtains? The colours of her walls? Look, that lamp bracket there was foreign, from Japan. There wasn’t a thing which was not foreign except, as she confessed when we went up to her dining-room for lunch, for this brass dish-warmer.

  She sat with us, not eating, staring at our plates, hand supporting her chin, widening her eyes dreamily and smiling whenever our glances met. She was new to the business, she said with a giggle. She had not had any paying guests before, and so we must forgive her if she treated us like her children.

  Her sons arrived. They were in their teens, tall, and as cool towards us as their mother was demonstrative. They joined us at the table. Mrs Mahindra spooned out from the dishes into their plates, spooned out into our plates.

  Suddenly she giggled and nodded towards her elder son.

  ‘I want him to marry foreign.’

  The boy didn’t react.

  We talked about the weather and the heat.

  ‘The heat doesn’t affect us,’ the boy said. ‘Our bedrooms are air-conditioned.’

  Mrs Mahindra caught our eyes and gave a mischievous smile.

  She insisted on taking us out with her that afternoon to do a little shopping. She wanted to buy curtains for one of the downstairs rooms. But, we said, the curtains she had shown us in that room were brand new and very elegant. No, no, she said; we were only being polite. She wanted to buy new curtains that afternoon and she wanted our foreign advice.

  So we drove back into the centre. She pointed out the monuments: Humayun’s Tomb, India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan.

  ‘New Delhi, New Delhi,’ she sighed. ‘Capital of India.’

  We went from shop to shop, and I began to fade. Fading, I relapsed into mechanical speech. ‘Look,’ I said to the boy, pointing to a heap of slippers that were extravagantly of the orient, their tapering embroidered points curling back on themselves. ‘Look, those are rather amusing.’

  ‘They are too common for us.’

  His mother was known to the shop assistants. She engaged them all in friendly conversation. They offered her chairs. She sat; she fingered; she talked. Bolt after bolt was unwrapped for her. Blandly she watched and blandly she walked away. Her movements were easy; no one appeared to be offended. She knew what she wanted, and at last she found it.

  She asked us to study the fireplace that evening. It was of irregular shape and had been designed by her husband, who had also designed the irregular recesses, for electric lights, in the stone fence.

  ‘Modern. Modern. All modern.’

  In the morning the painters came to repaint the newly painted unused room to match the curtains that had been bought the previous afternoon.

  She came into our room as we lay stripped below the ceiling fan after breakfast. She sat on the edge of the bed and talked. She examined this stocking, that shoe, that brassière; she asked prices. She lured us out to watch the painters at work; she held the material against the paint and asked whether they went well together.

  She had nothing to do except to spend three thousand rupees a month. She had one especial friend. ‘Mrs M. Mehta. Secretary. Women’s League. Mrs M. Mehta. Air-conditioners and other electrical gadgets.’ The name and the words were familiar from advertisements. Regularly Mrs Mahindra visited Mrs M. Mehta; regularly she consulted her astrologer; regularly she shopped and went to the temple. Her life was full and sweet.

  A tall man of about fifty came to the house in the afternoon. He said he was answering an advertisement in the newspaper; he wished to lease the ground floor which we were occupying. He wore a double-breasted grey suit and spoke English with a strained army accent.

  ‘Mm.’ Mrs Mahindra looked away.

  The man in the grey suit continued to speak in English. He represented a large firm, he said. A firm with foreign connexions.

  ‘Mm.’ Her eyes became vacant; her palm went to her chin.

  ‘No one will sleep here.’ He was faltering a little; perhaps it had occurred to him that his firm was not as desirable as the ‘diplomatic’ foreigners so many advertisements solicited. ‘We will give you a year’s rent in advance and sign a lease for three years.’

 
; ‘Mm.’ She said, replying in Hindustani to his English, that she would have to talk to her husband. And then there were so many other people who were interested.

  ‘We intend to use the premises just as offices.’ His dignity was beginning to yield to a certain exasperation. ‘And all we would like is for a caretaker to sleep here at night. The house will remain as your home. We will give you twelve thousand rupees right away.’

  She stared in her abstracted way, as though sniffing the new paint and thinking about the curtains.

  ‘Duffer,’ she said when he had gone. ‘Talking English. Barra sahib. Duffer.’

  The next morning she was glum.

  ‘Letter. My husband’s father is coming. Today. Tomorrow.’ The prospect clearly depressed her. ‘Talk, talk, that-is-no-joke.’

  When we came back to the house that afternoon we found her sitting, sad and dutiful, with a white-haired man in Indian dress. She already seemed to have shrunk a little; she looked chastened, even embarrassed. It was our foreignness she stressed when she introduced us. Then she looked away, became abstracted and took no further part in the conversation.

  The white-haired man looked us over suspiciously. But he was, as Mrs Mahindra had hinted, a talker; and he regarded himself and especially his age, which was just over sixty, with wonder. It was not his adventures he spoke of so much as the habits he had formed in those sixty years. He rose at four every morning, he said; he went for a four- or five-mile walk; then he read some chapters of the Gita. He had followed this routine for forty years, and it was a routine he would recommend to any young man.