A Way in the World

Acclaim for

V. S. NAIPAUL’S

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

NONFICTION

The Writer and the World

Between Father and Son: Family Letters

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

India: A Million Mutinies Now

A Turn in the South

Finding the Center

Among the Believers

The Return of Eva Perón
(with
The Killings in Trinidad
)

India: A Wounded Civilization

The Overcrowded Barracoon

The Loss of El Dorado

An Area of Darkness

The Middle Passage

FICTION

Half a Life

The Enigma of Arrival

A Bend in the River

Guerrillas

In a Free State

A Flag on the Island
^*

The Mimic Men

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion
^*

A House for Mr. Biswas

Miguel Street

The Suffrage of Elvira
^*

The Mystic Masseur

^*
Published in an omnibus edition entitled
The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book

I LEFT HOME
more than forty years ago. I was eighteen. When I went back, after six years—and slowly: a two-week journey by steamer—everything was strange and not strange: the suddenness of night, the very big leaves of some trees, the shrunken streets, the corrugated-iron roofs. You could walk down a street and hear the American advertising jingles coming out of the Rediffusion sets in all the little open houses. Six years before I had known the jingles the Rediffusion sets played; but these jingles were all new to me and were like somebody else’s folksong now.

All the people on the streets were darker than I remembered: Africans, Indians, whites, Portuguese, mixed Chinese. In their houses, though, people didn’t look so dark. I suppose that was because on the streets I was more of a looker, half a tourist, and when I went to a house it was to be with people I had known years before. So I saw them more easily.

To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard size and real but blurred; the way I played with my first pair of dark glasses, moving between dazzle and coolness; or the way, on this first return, when I was introduced
to air-conditioning, I liked to move from the coolness of an air-conditioned room to the warmth outside, and back again. I was in time, over the years, and over many returns, to get used to what was new; but that shifting about of reality never really stopped. I could call it up whenever I wished. Up to about twenty years ago whenever I went back I could persuade myself from time to time that I was in a half-dream, knowing and not knowing. It was a pleasant feeling; it was a little like the sensations that came to me as a child when, once in the rainy season, I had “fever.”

It was at a time like that, a time of “fever,” during a return, that I heard about Leonard Side, a decorator of cakes and arranger of flowers. I heard about him from a school teacher.

The school she taught at was a new one, beyond the suburbs of the town, and in what had been country and plantations right up to the end of the war. The school grounds still looked like a piece of a cleared sugar-cane or coconut estate. There wasn’t even a tree. The plain two-storey concrete building—green roof, cream-coloured walls—stood by itself in the openness and the glare.

The teacher said, “The work we were doing in those early days was a little bit like social work, with girls from labouring families. Some of them had brothers or fathers or relations who had gone to jail; they talked about this in the most natural way. One day, at a staff meeting in that very hot school with the glare all around, one of the senior teachers, a Presbyterian Indian lady, suggested that we should have a May Day fair, to introduce the girls to that idea. Everybody agreed, and we decided that the thing to do would be to ask the girls to make flower displays or arrangements, and to give a prize to the girl who did the best display.

“If you had a prize you had to have a judge. If you didn’t have a good judge the idea wouldn’t work. Who was this judge to be? The people we taught were very cynical. They got it from their families. Oh, they were very respectful and
so on, but they thought that everybody and everything was crooked, and in their heart of hearts they looked down on the people above them. So we couldn’t have a judge from the government or the Education Department or anybody too famous. This didn’t leave us with too many names.

“One of the junior teachers, very young, a country girl herself, fresh from the GTC, the Government Training College, then said that Leonard Side would make the perfect judge.

“Who was Leonard Side?

“The girl had to think. Then she said, ‘He work all his life in flowers.’

“Well. But then somebody else remembered the name. She said Leonard Side gave little courses at the WAA, the Women’s Auxiliary Association, and people there liked him. That was the place to find him.

“The Women’s Auxiliary Association had been founded during the war and was modelled on the WVS in England. They had a building in Parry’s Corner, which was in the heart of the city. There was everything in Parry’s Corner, a garage for buses, a garage for taxis, a funeral parlour, two cafés, a haberdashery and dry-goods shop, and a number of little houses, some of them offices, some of them dwelling-places; and the well-known Parry family owned it all.

“It was easy for me to go to Parry’s Corner, and I offered to go and talk to Leonard Side. The WAA was in a very small building from the Spanish time. The flat front wall—a thick rubble wall, plastered and painted, with rusticated stone slabs at either end—rose up directly from the pavement, so that you stepped from the narrow pavement straight into the front room. The front door was bang in the middle of the pavement wall, and there was a little curtained window on either side. Door and windows had yellow-brown jalousies, linked wooden cross slats you could lift all at once and use an iron pin to close.