An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

  10. Emergency

  CHINESE LAUNCH MASSIVE, SIMULTANEOUS ATTACKS IN NEFA AND LADAKH. Newspaper headlines can appear to exult. In Madras, where I was, the waiters at the hotel read the news to one another in corridors and on staircase landings; and in Mount Road the unemployed boys and men who usually stood outside the Kwality Restaurant, offering to fetch taxis and scooters for people who had had their lunch, gathered round a man who was reading aloud from a Tamil newspaper. On the pavement women dished out cooked meals for labourers at a few annas a head; in side streets, amid buses and cars, bare-backed carters pulled and pushed at their heavy-wheeled carts, grunting, the carters between the shafts disguising their strain by a lightfooted, mincing walk. The setting mocked the headlines. India did not qualify for modern warfare. ‘She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!’ So Forster’s Fielding had mocked forty years before; and after fifteen years of independence India remained in many ways a colonial country. She continued to produce mainly politicians and speeches. Her ‘industrialists’ were mainly traders, importers of simple machinery, manufacturers under licence. Her administration was still negative. It collected taxes, preserved order; and now to the passion of an aroused nation it could only respond with words. The Emergency was a seeking for precedents, the issuing of a correct Defence of the Realm Act, complete with instructions about gas masks, incendiary bombs and stirrup pumps. The Emergency was suspension and cancellation; censorship which encouraged rumour and panic; slogans in the newspapers. The Emergency became words, English words. THIS IS TOTAL WAR, the Bombay weekly said on its front page. ‘What do I mean by total war?’ the IAS candidate said, replying to a question from the examining board. ‘It is a war in which the whole world takes part.’ The news grew worse. There were rumours of Gurkhas sent up to Ladakh armed only with their knives, and of men flown from the Assam plains to the mountains of NEFA clad only in singlets and tennis-shoes. All the swift violence of which the country was capable was gathered into one ball; there was a feeling as of release and revolution. Anything might have happened; if will alone counted, the Chinese would have been pushed back to Lhasa in a week. But from the politicians there came only speeches, and from the administrator correct regulations. The famous Fourth Division was cut to pieces; the humiliation of the Indian Army, India’s especial pride, was complete. Independent India was now felt to be a creation of words – ‘Why didn’t we have to fight for our freedom?’ – and it was collapsing in words. The magic of the leader failed, and presently passion subsided into fatalism.

  *

  The Chinese invasion had been with us for a week. In the house of a friend there gathered for dinner a film producer, a scriptwriter, a journalist and a doctor. Before we went in we sat in the veranda, and even as I listened to the talk I knew I could not convincingly reconstruct it. At times it seemed frivolous and satirical; then despairing; then fantastic. Its moods were always muted. The Chinese would stop at the Brahmaputra, the producer said; they merely wanted to consolidate their occupation of Tibet. He spoke coolly; no one questioned his assumption that India could not be anything but passive. From this the talk slipped to a good-humoured disputation about karma and the value of human existence; and before I could work out how it had done so, we were back to the border situation. The country’s unpreparedness was ridiculed. No one was blamed, no plans were put forward: a comic situation was merely outlined. And where was this leading? ‘A fact many people do not know,’ the doctor said, ‘is that it is dangerous to have an inoculation against cholera during an epidemic.’ The medical analogy was overwhelming: the country had been unprepared and it was foolish, indeed dangerous, to make any preparations now. This was accepted; the film producer repeated his view that the Chinese would stop at the Brahmaputra. Gandhi was mentioned; but how did the doctor move on from this to state his belief in the occult, and why did he throw out, almost as a debating point, that ‘the great healers have always used their powers to save themselves’? We remained for some time on the subject of miracles. The Tibetans, I heard, were suffering because they had forgotten the mantras, charms, which might have repelled their enemies. I examined the faces of the speakers. They seemed serious. But were they? Mightn’t their conversation have been a type of medieval intellectual exercise, the dinner-time recreation of South Indian brahmins? Dinner was announced, and now at last a conclusion was reached. Indians too, it was said, had forgotten the mantras; they were powerless against their enemies and there was nothing that could be done. The situation on the border had been talked away. We went in calmly to dinner and talked of other matters.

  *

  Indian life, Indian death, went on.

  Wanted a Telugu Brahmin Vellanadu non-Kausiga Gotram bride below 22 years for young graduate earning Rs 200 monthly.

  On the grass verge outside the hotel, next to the open refuse-heap where women and buffaloes daily rummaged among the used banana food-leaves and the hotel’s discarded food, a little brown puppy lay dying. It moved about a small area, as though imprisoned, fading from day to day. One morning it looked dead. But a crow approached; and the puppy’s tail lifted and dropped.

  Exquisitely beautiful, Enchanting classical Bharatha Natyam dancer, brilliant graduate, aristocratic family, broad-minded, delightful temperament, fair, slim, tall, modern outlook, aged twenty-one, wishes to marry a millowner, business magnate, well-to-do landlord, doctor, engineer, or top executive. Caste, creed, nationality no bar.

  The news from New Delhi did not change. But the festival of Deepavali was at hand and the beggars were swarming into Mount Road. This boy did not at first look like a beggar. He was handsome, of a fine brown complexion; he wore red shorts and had a white cloth over his shoulders. He caught sight of me as I came out of the post office; then, behaving as one suddenly reminded of duty, he smiled and lifted the white cloth to reveal a monstrously deformed right arm. It was no arm at all; it was shaped like a woman’s breast, ending not in a nipple but in a fingernail on a toy finger.

  *

  There was an audience of eight – not counting the secretary and the top-knotted watchman – for the lecture at the Triplicane Theosophical Society on ‘Annie Besant, Our Leader’. The speaker was a middle-aged Canadian woman. She came from Vancouver. This was not as odd as it appeared, she said: according to Annie Besant, Vancouver had been a centre of the occult in far-off times. Annie Besant’s Irish ancestry doubtless explained her psychic gifts, and much of her character could be explained by what she must have been in former lives. Annie Besant had been, above all, a great leader; and it was the duty of every Theosophist to be a leader, to keep Annie Besant’s message alive and her books in circulation. The Theosophical Society was now encountering a certain indifference – the secretary had already said as much – and many people were no doubt asking why, if she was with us again, Annie Besant wasn’t in the Theosophical Society. But there was no logic in the question. There was no reason why Annie Besant should be in the Society. Her work for the Society had been done in a previous life; she was now almost certainly, under what name we could not tell, doing equally important work in some other field. Two men in the audience were dozing.

  *

  Behind the high, clean walls of the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, one hundred miles to the south, they were perfectly calm. In 1950, the year of his death, Aurobindo had warned Mr Nehru of the expansionist designs of ‘a yellow race’; he had prophesied the Chinese conquest of Tibet and had seen this as the first step in the Chinese attempt to conquer India. It was there in black and white in one of the Ashram’s numerous publications, and must have been shown often in the last few days: the receptionist opened the book easily at the correct page.

  The Master’s raised, flower-strewn samadhi, a site now for collective meditation, lay in the cool paved courtyard of the Ashram. The Mother was still alive, though now a little withdrawn. She gave darshan – made an appearance, offered a sight of herself – only on important an
niversaries: the date of Aurobindo’s birth, the date of her own arrival in India, and so on. Of Aurobindo I knew a little. He had been educated almost wholly in England; returning to India, he became a revolutionary; escaping arrest, he fled to Pondicherry, a French territory, and there, abandoning politics, he had remained, a revered holy man in a growing ashram. But of the Mother I knew nothing except that she was a Frenchwoman, an associate of Aurobindo’s, and that her position in the Ashram was special. For three and a half rupees I bought a book from the Ashram’s bookstand, Letters of Sri Aurobindo on the Mother.

  Q: Am I right in thinking that she as an Individual embodies all the Divine Powers and brings down the Grace more and more to the physical plane? and her embodiment is a chance for the entire physical to change and transform?

  A: Yes. Her embodiment is a chance for the earth-consciousness to receive the Supramental into it and to undergo first the transformation necessary for that to be possible. Afterwards there will be a further transformation by the Supramental, but the whole consciousness will not be supramentalized – there will be first a new race representing the Supermind, as man represents the mind.

  Photographs of the Mother by Henri Cartier Bresson were also on sale. They showed a Frenchwoman of a certain age, with an angular face and large, slightly protruding teeth. She was smiling; her cheeks were full and well defined. An embroidered scarf covered her head and came down to just above her darkened eyes, which held nothing of the good humour of the lower half of her face. The scarf was tied or pinned at the back of her head and the ends fell on either side of her neck.

  Q: Pourquoi la Mère s’habille-t-elle avec des vêtements riches et beaux?

  A: Avez-vous donc pour conception que le Divin doit être réprésenté sur terre par la pauvreté et la laideur?

  Both Aurobindo and the Mother had Lights. Aurobindo’s had been pale blue; his body glowed for days after he died. The Mother’s Light was white, sometimes gold.

  When we speak of the Mother’s Light or my Light in a special sense, we are speaking of a special occult action – we are speaking of certain lights that come from the Supermind. In this action the Mother’s is the White Light that purifies, illumines, brings down the whole essence and power of the Truth and makes the transformation possible …

  The Mother has certainly no idea of making people see it – it is of themselves that one after another, some 20 or 30 in the Ashram, I believe, have come to see. It is certainly one of the signs that the Higher Force (call it supramental or not) is beginning to influence Matter.

  The Mother was also responsible for the organization of the Ashram; an occasional impatience in Aurobindo’s replies to inmates hinted at early difficulties.

  In the organization of work there was formerly a formidable waste due to the workers and sadhaks following their own fancy almost entirely without respect for the Mother’s will; that was largely checked by reorganization.

  It is a mistake to think that the Mother’s not smiling means either displeasure or disapproval of something wrong in the sadhak. It is very often merely a sign of absorption or of inner concentration. On this occasion the Mother was putting a question to your soul.

  Mother did not know at that time of your having spoken to T. So your conjecture of that being the cause of her fancied displeasure is quite groundless. Your idea about Mother’s mysterious smile is your own imagination – Mother says that she smiled with the utmost kindness.

  It is not because your French is full of mistakes that Mother does not correct it, but because I will not allow her to take more work on herself so far as I can help it. Already she has no time to rest sufficiently at night and most of the night she is working at the books, reports and letters that pour on her in masses. Even so she cannot finish in time in the morning. If she has to correct all the letters of the people who have just begun writing in French as well as the others, it means another hour or two of work – she will be able to finish only at nine in the morning and come down at 10.30. I am therefore trying to stop it.

  All bad thoughts upon the Mother or throwing of impurities on her may affect her body, as she has taken the sadhaks into her consciousness; nor can she send these things back to them as it might hurt them.

  Withdrawn though the Mother now was, her hand could still be seen in the running of the Ashram. The noticeboard carried notices about the cholera outbreak in Madras – inmates were warned against contact with people from that town – and about the annoyance of chatter at the Ashram gates; the notices were signed ‘M’, in a firm, stylish zigzag. And the Ashram was only part of the Aurobindo Society. Pondicherry had already melted into the rest of southern India; even the French language seemed to have disappeared. But the numerous, well-kept buildings of the Society still gave it the feel of a small French town that had been set down on a tropical coast. Walls were shuttered and blank against the light, which was intense above the raging surf; and the Society’s walls were painted in the Society’s colours. The Society seemed to be the only flourishing thing in Pondicherry. It had its estates outside the town; it had its workshops, its library, its printing press. It was a self-contained organization, efficiently run by its members. Their number could grow only by recruitment, from India and overseas, for the Mother, I was told, disapproved strongly of three things: politics, tobacco and sex. The children who came into the Ashram with their parents were taught trades as they grew up; the leaders among them wore distinctive uniforms, in the very short shorts of which I thought I could detect a French influence. Work was as important as meditation; the physical was not to be neglected. (I was later told by an Englishman in Madras that, running into a group of oddly dressed elderly Europeans on roller skates one day in Pondicherry, and tracing them to their source, he had come to the Ashram gates. But that might have been only a story. I saw only one European in the Ashram. He was barefooted and very pink; he wore a dhoti and Indian jacket; and his long white hair and beard gave him a resemblance to the dead Master.) By recruiting people from the world, then, the Society never became inbred; and by employing their developed talents it prospered.

  The present General Secretary, for instance, was a Bombay businessman before he withdrew to the Ashram and took the name of Navajata, the newborn. His appearance still suggested the businessman. He was holding a briefcase and he seemed pressed for time. But he said he had never been happier.

  ‘Now I must go,’ he said. ‘I have to go up and see the Mother.’

  ‘Tell me. Has the Mother said anything about the Chinese invasion?’

  ‘1962 is a bad year,’ he recited hurriedly. ‘1963 is going to be a bad year. Things will start getting better in 1964, and India will win through in 1967. Now I must go.’

  *

  For weeks I had been seeing this young man. I thought he was a business executive trainee of French or Italian origin. He was tall and thin, wore dark glasses, carried a briefcase, and had a brisk, twiddly walk. He always looked self-assured and purposeful, but it puzzled me that he seemed to have much time on his hands. I saw him at bus stops at odd times of day. I saw him in museums in the afternoons. I saw him at dance performances in the evenings. We often passed one another in the street. Then – one aspect of the mystery solved when, to our mutual astonishment, we saw one another in the corridor of the top floor of the hotel one morning – I discovered that he had the room next to mine.

  He puzzled and embarrassed me. But I was causing him distress, and I did not know it. In Madras they don’t invite you to their homes; whatever their eminence, they prefer to call on you. So I sat for hours in my hotel room every day, receiving, with the ‘boys’ continually bringing in coffee for new visitors. I believe it was the convivial sounds of chatter and coffee spoons which made my neighbour break down. We came out of our rooms at the same time one morning. Ignoring one another, we locked our doors. We turned. There was confrontation. And suddenly a torrent of American speech gushed out, brooking no interjection even of greeting.

  ‘How are you
? How long are you staying here? I’m in a terrible state. I’ve been here six months and I’ve lost sixteen pounds. I felt the call of the East ha-ha and came out to India to study ancient Indian philosophy and culture. It’s driving me mad. What do you think of the hotel? I think it’s creepy.’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘It’s the food.’ Mouth working, he struck his palm against his dark glasses. ‘It’s sending me blind. It’s these people. They’re crazy. They don’t accept you. Help me. You have people running in and out of your room all day. You know some English people here. Talk to them about me. Introduce me to them. They might take me in. You must help me.’

  I promised to try.

  The first person I spoke to said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Experience tells me that when people are doing inward things like answering the call of the East it is better to stay away.’

  I did not try again. And now I feared to meet the young American. I did not meet him. The trains between Madras and Calcutta were running again, after the long dislocation caused by floods and the movement of troops.

  *

  Ladies, painted in yellow on some carriages. Military, marked in chalk on many more. It was so unlikely, this train-load of soldiers moving north through all the distress of India to the calamity on the frontiers. With their olive-green uniforms, their good looks and good manners, and their moustached, swagger-sticked officers, they transformed the railway platforms at which we stopped: they lent drama and order, and to them how comforting the familiar, receding squalor must have been! The plump little major in my compartment, carrying his water in a champagne bottle, had been so quiet after leaving his wife and daughter at Madras Central station – the three had simply sat silently side by side. Now, as the journey lengthened, he brightened; he asked me the Indian questions: where did I come from, what did I do? And the soldiers became playful. Once the train stopped beside a field of sugarcane. A soldier jumped out and began to cut stalks of cane with his knife. More soldiers jumped out, more cane was cut. The angry farmer appeared. Money passed, anger turned to smiles and waves as we moved off again.