Literary Occasions

by V. S. Naipaul

  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 associated 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 bumped 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 relationship 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 passed. 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 hoarded 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 ship 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 passed 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 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.

  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 passing 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 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.”

  Mac
Gowan seems to have understood the relationship. 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 publishing,” 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, to modernize the Trinidad Guardian. The Port of Spain Gazette, founded in 1832, and representing French creole planter and business interests, was the established local paper. The 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 advertisements.

  MacGowan changed the front page. He gave the 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 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.

  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, 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 relationship 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 reasserted 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. 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 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 about “mad bats” that flew about in daylight, and his cables to The Times and New York Times about vampire bats and a special Trinidad form of rabies were said to be frightening away cruise ships.

  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 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, 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 one day. MacGowan sued and won. Journalistically, the case was also a triumph: the Guardian and its editor had become serious news in both papers. It was even better journalism when MacGowan sued the Guardian chairman for slander. For three weeks, in a realization of a Fleet Street ideal, the 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.

  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 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 fr
om the New York Herald Tribune of 24 June 1933, and asked for my comments.

  REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY

  HINDU GODDESS

  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 goddess Kali, Seepersad Naipaul, native writer, today offered a goat as sacrifice to appease the anger of the goddess.

  Naipaul wrote newspaper articles revealing that native farmers of Hindu origin had defied government regulations for combating cattle diseases and had been substituting ancient rites of the goddess 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 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 documents, even his ledger, had been lost.)