An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

  Afternoon now, and the train’s shadow racing beside us. Sunset, evening, night; station after dimly-lit station. It was an Indian railway journey, but everything that had before seemed pointless was now threatened and seemed worth cherishing; and as in the mild sunshine of a winter morning we drew near to green Bengal, which I had longed to see, my mood towards India and her people became soft. I had taken so much for granted. There, among the Bengali passengers who had come on, was a man who wore a long woollen scarf and a brown tweed jacket above his Bengali dhoti. The casual elegance of his dress was matched by his fine features and relaxed posture. Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.

  And it was in this mood that I walked about Calcutta, the ‘nightmare experience’ of Mr Nehru, ‘the world’s most miserable city’, according to an American magazine, ‘the pestilential behemoth’ of another American writer, the world’s last stronghold of Asiatic cholera, according to the World Health Organization: a city which, built for two million, now accommodated six million on its pavements and in its bastees.

  ‘Chuha,’ the waiter at Howrah station restaurant said affectionately, pointing. ‘Look, a rat.’ And the pink, depilated creature, barely noticed by the Assamese soldier and his wife, both sucking away at rice and curried fish, sluggishly made its way across the tiled floor and up a pipe. This promised horror. But nothing I had read or heard had prepared me for the red-brick city on the other side of Howrah Bridge which, if one could ignore the stalls and rickshaws and white-clad hurrying crowds, was at first like another Birmingham; and then, in the centre, at dusk, was like London, with the misty, tree-blobbed Maidan as Hyde Park, Chownringhee as a mixture of Oxford Street, Park Lane and Bayswater Road, with neon invitations, fuzzy in the mist, to bars, coffee-houses and air travel, and the Hooghly a muddier, grander Thames, not far away. On a high floodlit platform in the Maidan General Cariappa, the former commander-in-chief, erect, dark-suited, was addressing a small, relaxed crowd in Sandhurst-accented Hindustani on the Chinese attack. Around and about the prowed, battleship-grey Calcutta trams, bulging at exits and entrances with men in white, tanked away at less than ten miles an hour. Here, unexpectedly and for the first time in India, one was in a big city, the recognizable metropolis, with street names – Elgin, Lindsay, Allenby – oddly unrelated to the people who thronged them: incongruity that deepened as the mist thickened to smog and as, driving out to the suburbs, one saw the chimneys smoking among the palm trees.

  This was the city which, according to bazaar rumour, Chou En-lai had promised the Chinese people as a Christmas present. The Indian Marwari merchants, it was said, were already making enquiries about business prospects under Chinese rule; the same rumour had it that in the South the Madrasis, despite their objection to Hindi, were already learning Chinese. Morale was low; the administration in Assam had collapsed and there were tales of flight and panic. But it was not in this alone that the sadness of the city lay. With or without the Chinese, Calcutta was dead. Partition had deprived it of half its hinterland and burdened it with a vast dispirited refugee population. Even Nature had turned: the Hooghly was silting up. But Calcutta’s death was also of the heart. With its thin glitter, its filth and overpopulation, its tainted money, its exhaustion, it held the total Indian tragedy and the terrible British failure. Here the Indo-British encounter had at one time promised to be fruitful. Here the Indian renaissance had begun: so many of the great names of Indian reform are Bengali. But it was here, too, that the encounter had ended in mutual recoil. The cross-fertilization had not occurred, and Indian energy had turned sour. Once Bengal led India, in ideas and idealism; now, just forty years later, Calcutta, even to Indians, was a word of terror, conveying crowds, cholera and corruption. Its aesthetic impulses had not faded – there was an appealing sensibility in every Bengali souvenir, every over-exploited refugee ‘craft’ – but they, pathetically, threw into relief the greater decay. Calcutta had no leaders now, and apart from Ray, the film director, and Janah, the photographer, had no great names. It had withdrawn from the Indian experiment, as area after area of India was withdrawing, individual after individual. The British, who had built Calcutta, had ever been withdrawn from their creation; and they survived. Their business houses still flourished in Chownringhee; and to the Indians, products of the dead Indian renaissance, who now sat in some of the air-conditioned offices, Independence had meant no more than this: the opportunity to withdraw, British-like, from India. What then was the India that was left, for which one felt such concern? Was it no more than a word, an idea?

  *

  From the train Durgapur, the new steel town, was a spreading pattern of lights. I went out to the corridor and watched them until they disappeared. Such a small hope, and it was easy to imagine the lights extinguished. Bomdi-la fell that night. Assam lay open; Mr Nehru offered the people of the state comfort which was already like helpless condolence. Tibetan refugees got off the train at Banaras. There was smiling bewilderment on their broad, ruddy faces; no one spoke their language and they stood uncertainly beside their boxes, outlandish in their bulky wrappings, grimed to khaki, their long hair, their boots and hats. The hotel was deserted: internal air services had been cancelled. The young dark-suited manager and the uniformed servants stood silent and idle in the veranda. Something of the bazaar spirit and the spirit of wartime opportunism stirred within me. I stood on the steps and haggled. Success went to my head. ‘And that is to include morning coffee,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ the manager said sadly. ‘That is to include coffee.’

  Here in the cantonment area Banaras felt abandoned, and it was easy to imagine oneself a squatter. But in the town nothing hinted at tragedy. Wood was piled high on the ghats. Brightly shrouded bodies lay on flower-strewn litters at the water’s edge, unimportantly awaiting their pyres; and above occasional blazes, oddly casual and not too visible in the reflected glare of the Ganges, family groups smiled and chattered. The steep ghats, platformed and stepped, their names marked in large letters, were as thronged as a holiday beach. The pious stood in the water, relaxed below beach umbrellas or gathered round an expounding pundit; young men did exercises. Above, behind the high white river front, in the twisting alleys, dark between solid masonry and enchanting but for the cowdung, hawkers offered Banaras toys, silk and brass; and in the temples the guide-priests, young, washed and combed, chewed pan and cursed those who refused them alms.

  I went to the Nepalese Temple, ‘disfigured’, Murray’s Handbook said, ‘by erotic carvings; they do not catch the eye, provided that the attendant can be discouraged from pointing them out’. The attendant was a youth with a long switch; I begged him to point them out. ‘Here man and woman,’ he began unexcitedly. ‘Here other man. He Mr Hurry-up because he say, “Hurry up, hurry up.” ’ Tourist lore: the gloss did not please me. The pleasures of erotic art are fragile; I wished I had followed Murray’s advice.

  At dinner I asked the sad young manager to put on the radio for the news. It was as bad as could be expected. The manager held his hands behind his back and looked down, correct even in his growing distress. Then a reference to ‘Chinese Frontier Guards’ alerted me.

  ‘But we are listening to Peking, Mr Manager.’

  ‘It is All-India Radio. It’s the station I always listen to.’

  ‘Only the Chinese and Radio Pakistan talk of the Chinese Frontier Guards.’ ‘But it is in English. And the accent.… And it sounds so close.’

  It did indeed; it was coming over loud and clear. We tried to get New Delhi; we got squawks and static and a feeble, disappearing voi
ce.

  And the next day it was all over. The Chinese declared a ceasefire and promised a withdrawal. And, as if by magic, the hotel began to fill up.

  *

  The fighting was over but the Emergency continued, and it was the duty of this Commissioner to make tours through his Division, keeping up morale and raising funds. He had just finished one tour and had been presented with an album of photographs, mainly of himself receiving and being received. I sat in the back of his station-wagon now with some junior officers and looked through the photographs. We were travelling along an Indian road: a thin metalled strip between two lanes of earth that had been ground to fine, thick dust by the wheels of bullock-carts. This was Indian dust: it disfigured the trees that lined the road, it discoloured the fields for a hundred yards on either side. And regularly, at stations in the dust, there were reception committees, garlands, displays of calisthenics and rough exhibitions of rough local manufactures.

  The Commissioner was keen on soap and shoes, and everywhere we stopped the bearded Muslim shoemakers stood beside their shoes and the soapmakers stood beside their heavy, imperfectly moulded cubes of soap. At dinner one evening the Commissioner, dressed in a dark suit, explained his interest in soap and shoes. His voice dropped to tenderness. His daughter, he said, was at school in England. Through television or some other educational medium her companions had learned that there were no towns in India, that no one wore shoes or lived in houses or washed. ‘Is it true, Daddy?’ the distressed child had asked. So now the craftsmen of the Division made soap and shoes. Sometimes, when he was being received, the Commissioner broke through the circle of local dignitaries to greet the children of the very poor who were on the other side of the road. Sometimes, exercising the Commissioner’s prerogative, he took cakes of soap from the display and distributed them to these children, while the photographers, another album in mind, took pictures.

  It was a swift tour. To me it was remarkable that an area so large and nondescript and comfortless should be capable of such organization, and that behind the clouds of dust there should be people who, with so little encouragement and such poor materials, should yet be exercising craftsman’s skills. I would have liked to linger, to draw hope. But there was no time. The displays were too many. I was sitting in the back of the station-wagon and was the last to get out whenever we stopped; and it frequently happened that before I had had time to inspect the first exhibit the Commissioner and his officials were back at the station-wagon and waiting for me: since I was the last to get out I was the first to get in.

  We spent more time at the meetings. Here the thin-limbed boys in white shorts and vests had been assembled in the sun, ready to go through their gymnastic exercises. Here there were arches marked WELCOME in Hindi. Here the Commissioner was garlanded. The Indian politician, when garlanded, at once removes the garland and hands it to an attendant; this acceptance and instant rejection of dignity is the stylish Indian form. The Commissioner did not remove his garlands. Hoop after hoop of marigold was hung on his bowed head, until the marigolds rose to his ears and, from the back, he looked like an idol incongruously armed: in one hand he carried his lighted cigar, in the other his sun-helmet. His attendant was not far away. He carried his master’s cigar box and was dressed like a Mogul courtier: so the British had sought to degrade their predecessors.

  In the decorated tent the peasants sat on mats. For the officials there were chairs and a table. Names were read out and peasants rose, came to the Commissioner, bowed and presented rupee notes for the National Defence Fund. (As the Fund rose in the area, an IAS man told me, National Savings dropped.) Some women shyly presented jewellery. Sometimes there was no response to a name, and then from all corners of the tent came explanations: a death, of man or beast, an illness, a sudden journey. The money rose in a shaky pile on the plate and was handled casually by all.

  Then the Commissioner spoke. The Emergency was not over, not at all; the Chinese were still on India’s sacred soil. The people of India had been preached at for too long about peace and nonviolence. Now they had to be roused. The Commissioner sought to do so first by appealing to the patriotism of the peasants and then by analysing the nature of the Chinese threat. By any Indian standard the Chinese were unclean. They ate beef: this was for the Hindus in the audience. They ate pork: this was for the Muslims. They ate dogs: this was for everyone. They ate cats, rats, snakes. The peasants remained passive, and were only roused when the Commissioner, playing his last card, invoked the Hindu goddesses of destruction.

  The Commissioner had a cheer-leader, a tall elderly man in an old double-breasted grey suit. He wore spectacles and carried a sun-helmet which was the fellow of the Commissioner’s. He chewed pan constantly; his mouth was large, with flapping red-stained lips. His face was without expression; he seemed to be doing sums in his head all the time. Clerk-like, adjusting his spectacles, he went to the microphone and stood silently before it. Suddenly he opened his enormous red mouth, revealing fillings and pieces of mangled betel-nut, and screamed: ‘Kali Mata ki – ’

  ‘Jai!’ the peasants shouted, their eyes brightening, the smiles staying on their faces. ‘Long live Mother Kali!’

  ‘But what is this?’ the Commissioner’s assistant said. ‘I heard nothing.’ It was his line; at every meeting he used it. ‘We will try again, and this time I want to hear you. Kali Mata ki – ’

  ‘Jai! Jai! Jai!’

  Once, twice, three times the goddesses were invoked, to growing enthusiasm. Then abruptly the assistant turned, walked back to his seat, sat on it decisively, slapped his sun-helmet on his knees, stared straight ahead and, teeth and lips working over the pan, seemed immediately absorbed in mental arithmetic.

  When the audience was too small, the Commissioner showed his displeasure by refusing to speak or to leave. Then officials and policemen bustled penitentially about; they summoned peasants from the fields and their homes and marched children out from the schools. But there was never any trouble in finding an audience for the evening concerts. Singers of local renown chewed pan and sang songs of their own about the Chinese invasion into microphones shrouded with cloth to protect them from pan-splutterings. There were sketches about the need to save, to grow more food, to contribute to the National Defence Fund, to give blood. Once or twice an ambitious playwright showed a local hero dying in battle against the Chinese; and it was clear that no one in the village knew what the Chinese looked like.

  From the railway train and from the dusty roads India appeared to require only pity. It was an easy emotion, and perhaps the Indians were right: it was compassion like mine, so strenuously maintained, that denied humanity to many. It separated; it permitted the surprise and emotion I felt at these concerts, simple exhibitions of humanity. Anger, compassion and contempt were aspects of the same emotion; they were without value because they could not endure. Achievement could begin only with acceptance.

  We were now in a region which, though physically no different from the surrounding areas, was famous for its soldiers. Was this due to some ancient mixing of bloods preserved by caste rules? To some pertinacious Rajput strain? India was full of such puzzles. The crowd here was too large for the tent. Some had put on their uniforms and decorations. The cheer-leader picked them out and seated them on a bench at the edge of the tent. But one or two preferred to walk slowly up and down the road while the Commissioner spoke. So far the Commissioner had been speaking to people who were a little irritated and resentful at having to leave their fields or the idleness of their homes. But this crowd was attentive from the first. The old soldiers gazed steadily at the Commissioner and every point he made was registered on their faces. The Chinese ate pork. Brows puckered. The Chinese ate dogs. Brows puckered more deeply. The Chinese ate rats. Eyes popped, heads lifted as struck.

  The Commissioner had scarcely finished speaking when a man ran out from the crowd and threw himself at his feet, weeping.

  The crowd relaxed and smiled.

  ‘Get up, get up
,’ the Commissioner said, ‘and tell me what you have to say.’

  ‘You ask me to fight, and I want to fight. But how can I fight when I have no food and my family has no food? How can I fight when I have lost my land?’

  The crowd began to titter.

  ‘You have lost your land?’

  ‘In the resettlement.’

  The Commissioner spoke to his cheer-leader.

  ‘All my good land,’ the man wept, ‘they gave to somebody else. All the bad land they gave to me.’

  There was laughter from the old soldiers.

  ‘I will look into it,’ the Commissioner said.

  The crowd was breaking up. The weeping man disappeared; The jeers at his outburst died down; and we moved on to the tea which the headman, a man of few words, had prepared for us.

  There was another concert that evening. It had been organized by the local teacher. He came on just before the end and said that he had written a new poem which he would recite to us if the Commissioner gave his permission. The Commissioner took his cigar out of his mouth and nodded. The teacher bowed; then, with passionate intonations and tormented gestures, he recited. The facile Hindi rhymes tumbled out as if newly discovered, and the teacher worked himself into a frenzy as he came to his climax, which was a plea for the settled reign on earth of