It is now nearly thirty years since, in a BBC room in London, on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth, “nonrustle” BBC script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book. I was some three months short of my twenty-third birthday. I had left Oxford ten months before, and was living in London, trying to keep afloat and, in between, hoping to alleviate my anxiety but always only adding to it, trying to get started as a writer.

At Oxford I had been supported by a Trinidad government scholarship.

In London I was on my own. The only money I got—eight guineas a week, less “deductions”— came from the BBC Caribbean Service. My only piece of luck in the past year, and even in the past two years, had been to get a part-time job editing and presenting a weekly literary program for the Caribbean.

The Caribbean Service was on the second floor of what had been the Langham Hotel, opposite Broadcasting House. On this floor the BBC had set aside a room for people like me, “freelances”—to me then not a word suggesting freedom and valor but suggesting only people on the fringe of a mighty enterprise, a depressed and suppliant class: I would have given a lot to be “staff.”

The freelances’ room didn’t encourage thoughts of radio glory; it was strictly for the production of little scripts. Something of the hotel atmosphere remained: in the great Victorian-Edwardian days of the Langham Hotel (it was mentioned in at least one Sherlock Holmes story), the freelances’ room might have been a pantry. It was at the back of the heavy brick building, and gloomy when the ceiling lights were turned off. It wasn’t cheerful when the lights were on: ocher walls with a pea green dado, the gloss paint tarnished; a radiator below the window, with grit on the sill; two or three chairs, a telephone, two tables, and two old standard typewriters.

It was in that Victorian-Edwardian gloom, and at one of those typewriters, that late one afternoon, without having any idea where I was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page, I wrote: Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘ ‘What happening there, Bogart?”

That was a Port of Spain memory. It seemed to come from far back, but it was only eleven or twelve years old. It came from the time when we—various branches of my mother’s family—were living in Port of Spain, in a house that belonged to my mother’s mother. We were country people, Indians, culturally still Hindus; and this move to Port of Spain was in the nature of a migration: from the Hindu and Indian countryside to the white-Negro-mulatto town.

Hat was our neighbor on the street. He wasn’t Negro or mulatto. But we thought of him as halfway there. He was a Port of Spain Indian. The Port of Spain Indians—there were pockets of them— had no country roots, were individuals, hardly a community, and were separate from us for an additional reason: many of them were Madrassis, descendants of South Indians, not Hindi-speaking, and not people of caste. We didn’t see in them any of our own formalities or restrictions; and though we lived raggedly ourselves (and were far too numerous for the house), we thought of the other Indians in the street only as street people.

That shout of “Bogart!” was in more than one way a shout from the street. And, to add to the incongruity, it was addressed to someone in our yard: a young man, very quiet, yet another person connected in some way with my mother’s family. He had come not long before from the country and was living in the separate one-room building at the back of our yard.

We called this room the “servant room.” Port of Spain houses, up to the 1930s, were built with these separate servant rooms— verandah-less little boxes, probably descended in style from the ancillary “Negro houses” of slave times. I suppose that in one or two houses in our street, servants of the house actually lived in the servant room. But generally it wasn’t so. Servant rooms, because of the privacy they offered, were in demand, and not by servants.

It was wartime. The migration of my own family into the town had become part of a more general movement. People of all conditions were coming into Port of Spain to work at the two American bases. One of those bases had been built on recently reclaimed land just at the end of our street—eight houses down. Twice a day we heard the bugles; Americans, formal in their uniforms, with their khaki ties tucked into their shirts, were another part of the life of our street. The street was busy; the yards were crowded. Our yard was more crowded than most. No servant ever lodged in our servant room. Instead, the room sheltered a succession of favored transients, on their way to better things. Before the big family rush, some of these transients had been outsiders; but now they were mostly relations or people close to the family, like Bogart.

The connection of Bogart with my mother’s family was unusual. At the turn of the century Bogart’s father and my mother’s father had traveled out together from India as indentured immigrants. At some time during the long and frightening journey they had sworn a bond of brotherhood; that was the bond that was being honored by their descendants.

Bogart’s people were from the Punjab, and handsome. The two brothers we had got to know were ambitious men, rising in white-collar jobs. One was a teacher; the other (who had passed through the servant room) was a weekend sportsman who, in the cricket season, regularly got his name in the paper. Bogart didn’t have the education or the ambition of his brothers; it wasn’t clear what he did for a living. He was placid, without any pronounced character, detached, and in that crowded yard oddly solitary.

Once he went away. When he came back, some weeks or months later, it was said that he had been “working on a ship.” Port of Spain was a colonial port, and we thought of sailors as very rough, the dregs. So this business of working on a ship— though it suggested money as well as luck, for the jobs were not easy to come by—also held suggestions of danger. It was something for the reckless and the bohemian. But it must have suited Bogart, because after a time he went away—disappeared—again.

There was a story this time that he had gone to Venezuela. He came back; but I had no memory of his return. His adventures—if he had had any—remained unknown to me. I believe I was told that the first time he had gone away, to work on the ship, he had worked as a cook. But that might have been a story I made up myself. All that I knew of Bogart while he lived in the servant room was what, as a child, I saw from a distance. He and his comings and goings were part of the confusion and haphazardness and crowd of that time.

I saw a little more of him four or five years later. The war was over. The American base at the end of the street was closed. The buildings were pulled down, and the local contractor, who knew someone in our family, gave us the run of the place for a few days, to pick up what timber we wanted. My mother’s extended family was breaking up into its component parts; we were all leaving my grandmother’s house. My father had bought a house of his own; I used timber from the old American base to make a new front gate. Soon I had got the Trinidad government scholarship that was to take me to Oxford.

Bogart was still reportedly a traveler. And in Trinidad now he was able to do what perhaps he had always wanted to do: to put as much distance as possible between himself and people close to him. He was living in Carenage, a seaside village five miles or so west of Port of Spain. Carenage was a Negro-mulatto place, with a Spanish flavor (’pagnol, in the local French patois). There were few Indians in Carenage; that would have suited Bogart.

With nothing to do, waiting to go away, I was restless, and I sometimes cycled out to Carenage. It was pleasant after the hot ride to splash about in the rocky sea, and pleasant after that to go and have a Coca-Cola at Bogart’s. He lived in a side street, a wandering lane, with yards that were half bush, half built-up. He was a tailor now, apparently with customers; and he sat at his machine in his open shop, welcoming but undemonstrative, as placid, as without conversation, and as solitary as ever. But he was willing to play with me. He was happy to let me paint a signboard for his shop. The idea was mine, and he took it seriously. He had a carpenter build a board of new wood; and on this, over some days, after priming and painting, I did the sign. He put it up over his shop door, and I thought it looked genuine, a real sign. I was amazed; it was the first signboard I had ever done.

The time then came for me to go to England. I left Bogart in Carenage. And that was where he had continued to live in my memory, faintly, never a figure in the foreground: the man who had worked on a ship, then gone to Venezuela, sitting placidly ever after at his sewing machine, below my sign, in his little concrete house-and-shop.

That was Bogart’s story as I knew it. And—after all our migrations within Trinidad, after my own trip to England and my time at Oxford—that was all the story I had in mind when, after two failed attempts at novels, I sat at the typewriter in the freelances’ room in the Langham Hotel, to try once more to be a writer. And luck was with me that afternoon. Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, “What happening there, Bogart?” Luck was with me, because that first sentence was so direct, so uncluttered, so without complications, that it provoked the sentence that was to follow. Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, “What happening there, Hat?”

The first sentence was true. The second was invention. But together—to me, the writer—they had done something extraordinary. Though they had left out everything—the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned—they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street. And together, as sentences, words, they had set up a rhythm, a speed, which dictated all that was to follow.

The story developed a first-person narrator. And for the sake of speed, to avoid complications, to match the rhythm of what had gone before, this narrator could not be myself. My narrator lived alone with his mother in a house on the street. He had no father; he had no other family. So, very simply, all the crowd of my mother’s extended family, as cumbersome in real life as it would have been to a writer, was abolished; and, again out of my wish to simplify, I had a narrator more in tune with the life of the street than I had been.

Bogart’s tailoring business, with the signboard I had done for him, I transferred from the Carenage side street to the Port of Spain servant room, and with it there came some hint of the silent companionableness I had found in Bogart at that later period. The servant room and the street—the houses, the pavements, the open yards, the American base at the end of the street—became like a stage set. Anyone might walk down the street; anyone might turn up in the servant room. It was enough—given the rhythm of the narrative and its accumulating suggestions of street life—for the narrator to say so. So Bogart could come and go, without fuss. When, in the story, he left the servant room for the first time, it took little—just the dropping of a few names—to establish the idea of the street as a kind of club.

So that afternoon in the Langham Hotel, Port of Spain memories, disregarded until then, were simplified and transformed. The speed of the narrative—that was the speed of the writer. And everything that was later to look like considered literary devices came only from the anxiety of the writer. I wanted above all to take the story to the end. I feared that if I stopped too long anywhere, I might lose faith in what I was doing, give up once more, and be left with nothing.

Speed dictated the solution of the mystery of Bogart. He wished to be free (of Hindu family conventions, but this wasn’t stated in the story). He was without ambition, and had no skill; in spite of the signboard, he was hardly a tailor. He was an unremarkable man, a man from the country, to whom mystery and the name of Bogart had been given by the street, which had its own city sense of drama. If Bogart spent whole afternoons in his servant room playing Patience, it was because he had no other way of passing the time. If, until he fell into the character of the film Bogart, he had no conversation, it was because he had little to say. The street saw him as sensual, lazy, cool. He was in fact passive. The emotional entanglements that called him away from the street were less than heroic. With women, Bogart—unlike most men of the street— had taken the easy way out. He was that flabby, emasculated thing, a bigamist. So, looking only for freedom, the Bogart of my story had ended up as a man on the run. It was only in the solitude of his servant room that he could be himself, at peace. It was only with the men and boys of the street that he could be a man.

The story was short, 3,000 words, two foolscap sheets and a bit. I had—a conscious piece of magic that afternoon—set the typewriter at single space, to get as much as possible on the first sheet and also to create the effect of the printed page.

People were in and out of the freelances’ room while I typed. Some would have dropped by at the BBC that afternoon for the company and the chat, and the off chance of a commission by a producer for some little script. Some would have had work to do.

I suppose Ernest Eytle would have come in, to sit at the other typewriter and to peck, with many pauses, at the linking scripts or even a “piece” for the magazine program. And Ernest’s beautifully spoken words, crackling over the shortwave that evening, would suggest a busy, alert man, deep in the metropolitan excitements of London, sparing a few minutes for his radio talk. He was a mulatto from British Guiana. He was dark-suited, fat, and slow; when, some years later, I heard he had died, I was able mentally to transfer him, without any change, and without any feeling of shock, to a coffin. As much as broadcasting, Ernest liked the pub life around Broadcasting House. This sitting at the typewriter in the gloomy freelances’ room was like an imposition; and Ernest, whenever he paused to think, would rub a heavy hand down his forehead to his eyebrows, which he pushed back the wrong way; and then, like a man brushing away cobwebs, he would appear to dust his cheek, his nose, his lips, his chin.

Having done that with Ernest, I should say that my own typing posture in those days was unusual. My shoulders were thrown back as far as they could go; my spine was arched. My knees were drawn right up; my shoes rested on the topmost struts of the chair, left side and right side. So, with my legs wide apart, I sat at the typewriter with something like a monkey crouch.

The freelances’ room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the transient fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart’s Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn’t rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun.

I passed the three typed sheets around.

John Stockbridge was English. He worked for many BBC programs, domestic and overseas. Unlike the rest of us, he carried a briefcase; and that briefcase suggested method, steadiness, many commissions. At our first meeting in the freelances’ room, three or four months before, he hadn’t been too friendly—he no doubt saw me as an Oxford man, untrained, stepping just like that into regular radio work, taking the bread out of the mouths of more experienced men. But then his attitude towards me had become one of schoolmasterly concern. He wanted to rescue me from what, with his English eyes, he saw as my self-neglect. He wanted me to make a better job of myself, to present myself well, to wear better clothes, and especially to get rid of my dingy working-class overcoat. (I knew nothing about clothes, but I had always thought the overcoat was wrong: it had been chosen for me before I went up to Oxford by the Maltese manageress of an Earl’s Court boarding house.) Now, after he had read the story, John made a serious face and spoke a prodigious prophecy about my future as a writer. On such little evidence! But it was his way of finally accepting my ambition and my London life, and giving me a little blessing.

Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican. He worked in a nightclub, was also trying to get started as a writer, and had just begun to do broadcasts, talks, and readings. He compared learning to write with trying to wrap a whip around a rail; he thought I had begun to make the whip “stick.” He detected, and made me take out, one or two early sentences where I had begun to lose faith in the material and had begun to ridicule, not the characters, but the idea that what I was doing was a real story.

The most wholehearted acceptance came from Gordon Woolford. He too was from British Guiana. He came from a distinguished colonial family. He said he had some African ancestry, but it didn’t show. Some deep trouble with his father had kept Gordon away from his family and committed him, after a privileged prewar upbringing in Belgium and England, to a hard bohemian life in London. He was an unusually handsome man, in his mid-thirties. He had married a French girl, whom he had met when she was an assistant in one of the big London stores. That marriage had just broken up. Gordon was writing a novel about it, On the Rocks; it wasn’t something he was going to finish. He changed jobs often; he loved writing; his favorite book—at least it was always with him during his drinking bouts—was Scoop.

Something in the Bogart story touched Gordon. When he finished reading the story, he folded the sheets carefully; with a gesture as of acceptance he put the sheets in his inner jacket pocket; and then he led me out to the BBC club—he was not on the wagon that day. He read the story over again, and he made me read it with him, line by line, assessing the words and the tone: we might have been rehearsing a broadcast. The manuscript still has his fold marks and his wine stains.

During the writing of the Bogart story some memory—very vague, as if from a forgotten film—had come to me of the man who in 1938 or 1939, five years before Bogart, had lived in his servant room. He was a Negro carpenter; the small sheltered space between the servant room and the back fence was at once his kitchen and workshop. I asked him one day what he was making. He said—wonderfully to the six-year-old child who had asked the question—that he was making “the thing without a name.”

It was the carpenter’s story that I settled down to write the next day in the freelances’ room. I had little to go on. But I had a street, already peopled; I had an atmosphere; and I had a narrator. I stuck to the magic of the previous day: the nonrustle BBC paper, the typewriter set at single space. And I was conscious, with Gordon Woolford’s help, of certain things I had stumbled on the previous day: never to let the words get too much in the way, to be fast, to add one concrete detail to another, and above all to keep the tone right.

I mentally set the servant room in another yard. The only thing that Popo, who called himself a carpenter, ever built was the little galvanized-iron workshop under the mango tree at the back of his yard. And then scattered memories, my narrator, the life of the street, and my own childhood sense (as a six-year-old coming suddenly to Port of Spain from the Hindu rigors of my grandmother’s house in the country) of the intensity of the pleasures of people on the street, gave the carpenter a story. He was an idler, a happy man, a relisher of life; but then his wife left him.

Over the next few days the street grew. Its complexities didn’t need to be pointed; they simply became apparent. People who had only been names in one story got dialogue in the next, then became personalities; and old personalities became more familiar. Memory provided the material; city folklore as well, and city songs. An item from a London evening paper (about a postman throwing away his letters) was used. My narrator consumed material, and he seemed to be able to process every kind of material.

Even Gordon was written into the street. We were on the top of a bus one evening, going back from the BBC to Kilbum, the Irish working-class area where I lived in two rooms in the house of a BBC doorman. Gordon was talking of some early period of his life, some period of luxury and promise. Then he broke off, said, “But that was a long time ago,” and looked down through the reflections of glass into the street. That went to my heart. Within a few days I was to run it into the memory of a Negro ballad maker, disturbed but very gentle, who had called at my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain one day to sell copies of his poems, single printed sheets, and had told me a little of his life.

The stories became longer. They could no longer be written in a day. They were not always written in the freelances’ room. The technique became more conscious; it was not always possible to write fast. Beginnings, and the rhythms they established, didn’t always come naturally; they had to be worked for. And then the material, which at one time had seemed inexhaustible, dried up. I had come to the end of what I could do with the street, in that particular way. My mother said, “You getting too wild in this place. I think is high time you leave. ” My narrator left the street, as I had left Trinidad five years before. And the excitement I had lived with for five or six weeks was over.

I had written a book, and I felt it to be real. That had been my ambition for years, and an urgent ambition for the past year. And I suppose that if the book had had some response outside the freelances’ room I might have been a little more secure in my talent, and my later approach to writing would have been calmer; it is just possible.

But I knew only anxiety. The publisher that Andrew Salkey took the book to sent no reply for three months (the book remained unpublished for four years). And— by now one long year out of Oxford—I was trying to write another, and discovering that to have written a book was not to be a writer. Looking for a new book, a new narrative, episodes, I found myself as uncertain, and as pretending to be a writer, as I had been before I had written the story of Bogart.

To be a writer, I thought, was to have the conviction that one could go on. I didn’t have that conviction. And even when the new book had been written I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I thought I should wait until I had written three. And when, a year after writing the second, I had written the third, I thought I should wait until I had written six. On official forms I described myself as a “broadcaster,” thinking the word nondescript, suitable to someone from the freelances’ room; until a BBC man, “staff,” told me it was boastful.

So I became “writer.” Though to myself an unassuageable anxiety still attached to the word, and I was still, for its sake, practicing magic. I never bought paper to write on. I preferred to use “borrowed,” nonrustle BBC paper; it seemed more casual, less likely to attract failure. I never numbered my pages, for fear of not getting to the end. (This drew the only comment Ernest Eytle made about my writing. Sitting idly at his typewriter one day in the freelances’ room, he read some of my pages, apparently with good will. Then, weightily, he said, “I’ll tell you what you should do with this.” I waited. He said, “You should number the pages. In case they get mixed up.”) And on the finished manuscripts of my first four books—half a million words—I never with my own hand typed or wrote my name. I always asked someone else to do that for me. Such anxiety; such ambition.

The ways of my fantasy, the process of creation, remained mysterious to me. For everything that was false or didn’t work and had to be discarded I felt that I alone was responsible. For everything that seemed right I felt I had only been a vessel. There was the recurring element of luck, or so it seemed to me. True, and saving, knowledge of my subject—beginning with Bogart’s street—always seemed to come during the writing.

This element of luck isn’t so mysterious to me now. As diarists and letter writers repeatedly prove, any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away. When I began to write about Bogart’s street, I began to sink into a tract of experience I hadn’t before contemplated as a writer. This blindness might seem extraordinary in someone who wanted so much to be a writer. Half a writer’s work, though, is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from my grandmother’s Hindu house in the country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India; to Port of Spain, the Negro and G.I. life of its streets, and the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which was called Queen’s Royal College; and then Oxford, London, and the freelances’ room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where to focus.

In England I was also a colonial. Out of the stresses of that, and out of my worship of the name of writer, I had without knowing it fallen into the error of thinking of writing as a kind of display. My very particularity—which was the subject sitting on my shoulder—had been encumbering me.

The English or French writer of my age had grown up in a world that was more or less explained. He wrote against a background of knowledge. I couldn’t be a writer in the same way, because to be a colonial, as I was, was to be spared knowledge. It was to live in an intellectually restricted world; it was to accept those restrictions. And the restrictions could become attractive.

Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, “What happening there, Bogart?” That was a good place to begin. But I couldn’t stay there. My anxiety constantly to prove myself as a writer, the need to write another book and then another, led me away.

There was much in that call of “Bogart!” that had to be examined. It was spoken by a Port of Spain Indian, a descendant of nineteenth-century indentured immigrants from South India; and Bogart was linked in a special Hindu way with my mother’s family. So there was a migration from India to be considered, a migration within the British Empire. There was my Hindu family, with its fading memories of India; there was India itself. And there was Trinidad, with its past of slavery, its mixed population, its racial antagonisms, and its changing political life; once part of Venezuela and the Spanish Empire, now English-speaking, with the American base and an open-air cinema at the end of Bogart’s street. And just across the Gulf of Paria was Venezuela, the sixteenth-century land of El Dorado, now a country of dictators, but drawing Bogart out of his servant room with its promise of Spanish sexual adventure and the promise of a job in its oil fields.

And there was my own presence in England, writing: the career wasn’t possible in Trinidad, a small, mainly agricultural colony: my vision of the world couldn’t exclude that important fact.

So step by step, book by book, though seeking each time only to write another book, I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised. The book before always turned out to have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge. And the very first, the one begun in the freelances’ room, seemed to have been written by an innocent, a man at the beginning of knowledge both about himself and the writing career that had been his ambition from childhood.

II

The ambition to be a writer was given me by my father. He was a journalist for much of his working life. This was an unusual occupation for a Trinidad Indian of his generation. My father was born in 1906. At that time the Indians of Trinidad were a separate community, mainly rural and Hindi-speaking, attached to the sugar estates of central and southern Trinidad. Many of the Indians of 1906 had been born in India and had come out to Trinidad as indentured laborers on five-year contracts. This form of Indian contract labor within the British Empire ended, as a result of nationalist agitation in India, only in 1917.

In 1929 my father began contributing occasional articles on Indian topics to the Trinidad Guardian. In 1932, when I was born, he had become the Guardian staff correspondent in the little market town of Chaguanas. Chaguanas was in the heart of the sugar area and the Indian area of Trinidad. It was where my mother’s family was established. Contract labor was far behind them; they were big landowners.

Two years or so after I was born my father left the Guardian, for reasons that were never clear to me. For some years he did odd jobs here and there, now attached to my mother’s family, now going back to the protection of an uncle by marriage, a rich man, founder and part owner of the biggest bus company in the island. Poor himself, with close relations who were still agricultural laborers, my father dangled all his life in a half dependence and half esteem between these two powerful families.

In 1938 my father was taken on by the Guardian again, this time as a city reporter. And we—my father, my mother, and their five children, our own little nucleus within my mother’s extended family—moved to Port of Spain, to the house owned by my mother’s mother. That was when I was introduced to the life of the street (and the mystery of the Negro carpenter in the servant room, making “the thing without a name”). That was also when I got to know my father.

I had lived before then (at least in my own memory) in my mother’s family house in Chaguanas. I knew I had a father, but I also knew and accepted that—like the fathers of others of my cousins—he was not present. There was a gift one year of a very small book of English poetry; there was a gift another time of a toy set of carpenter’s tools. But the man himself remained vague.

He must have been in the house, though; because in the subsidiary two-story wooden house at the back of the main building there were—on the inner wall of the upstairs verandah—jumbled ghostly impressions of banners or posters he had painted for someone in my mother’s family who had fought a local election. The cotton banners had been stretched on the verandah wall; the beautiful oil paint, mainly red, had soaked through, disfiguring (or simply adding to) the flowered designs my mother’s father (now dead) had had painted on the lower part of the verandah wall. The glory, of the election and my father’s banners, belonged to the past; I accepted that.

My mother’s family house in Chaguanas was a well-known local “big house.” It was built in the North Indian style. It had balustraded roof terraces, and the main terrace was decorated at either end with a statue of a rampant lion. I didn’t like or dislike living there; it was all I knew. But I liked the move to Port of Spain, to the emptier house, and the pleasures and sights of the city: the squares, the gardens, the children’s playground, the streetlights, the ships in the harbor.

There was no American base at the end of the street. The land, still hardly with a name, known only as Docksite, had just been reclaimed, and the gray mud dredged up from the harbor was still drying out, making wonderful patterns as it crusted and cracked. After the shut-in compound life of the house in Chaguanas, I liked living on a city street. I liked looking at other people, other families. I liked the way things looked. In the morning the shadows of houses and streets fell on the pavement opposite; in the afternoon our pavement was in shadow. And I liked the municipal order of each day: the early-morning cleaning of the streets, with the hydrants turned on to flood the green-slimed gutters with fresh water; the later collection of refuse; the passing in midmorning of the ice cart.

Our house stood on high concrete pillars. The newspaper man threw the Guardian as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the Guardian, the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the Guardian at that time—he didn’t like what he was doing. The ambitions were connected with what my father had done for the Guardian long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me.

My father had a bookcase-and-desk. It was a bulky piece of furniture, stained dark red and varnished, with glass doors to the three bookshelves, and a lipped, sloping, hinged lid to the desk. It was made from pine and packing crates (the raw, unstained side panel of one drawer was stenciled STOW AWAY FROM BOILERS). It was part of the furniture my father had brought from where he had been living in the country. I was introduced to this furniture in Port of Spain, recognized it as my father’s and therefore mine, and got to like each piece; in my grandmother’s house in Chaguanas nothing had belonged to me.

Below the sloping lid of the desk, and in the square, long drawers, were my father’s records: old papers, where silverfish squirmed and mice sometimes nested with their pink young—to be thrown out into the yard for chickens to peck at. My father liked to keep documents. There were letters from a London writing school, letters from the Guardian. I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relishing them as things from the past; though the raised letterheads meant more to me than the letters. There was a passport with my father’s picture—a British passport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this passport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the Guardian. It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the laborers and the wages they had been paid week by week.

This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fashioned Guardian type and layout—and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark—that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print.

I saw my father’s name in print, in the two spellings, Naipal and Naipaul. I saw the pen names that in those glorious days he had sometimes also used: Paul Nye, Paul Prye. He had written a lot, and I had no trouble understanding that the Guardian had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper.

My father had written about village feuds, family vendettas, murders, bitter election battles. (And how satisfying to see, in print, the names of those relations of my mother’s whose ghostly election banners, from a subsequent election, I had seen on the verandah wall of my mother’s family house!) My father had written about strange characters. Like the Negro “hermit”: once rich and pleasure-seeking, now penniless and living alone with a dog in a hut in the swamplands. The Guardian called my father’s hermit Robinson Crusoe. Then, true to his new name, this Crusoe decided to go to Tobago, Crusoe’s island; he intended to walk there; and, fittingly, there was no more about him. There was the Negro woman of 112 who said she remembered the days of slavery when “Negroes were lashed to poles and flogged. ” That didn’t mean much; but the words (which made one of the headlines) stuck, because I didn’t know that particular use of “lash.”

My father had his own adventures. Once, on a rainy night and far from home, his motorcycle skidded off the road and for some reason he had to spend the night up a tree. Was that true? I don’t remember what my father said, but I understood that the story was exaggerated.

It didn’t matter. I read the stories as stories; they were written by my father; I went back to them as to memorials of a heroic time I had missed. There was something about the ledger I noticed but never asked about, accepting it as a fact about the ledger: the clippings stopped quite suddenly; at least a third of the book remained unused.

In the Guardian that came to the house every day my father’s name didn’t appear. The style of the paper had changed; the reporting was all anonymous. The paper was part of the drama of the early morning, but I was interested in it only as a printed object. I didn’t think to look for what my father had written.

The fact was I was too young for newspapers. I was old enough only for stories. The ledger in the desk was like a personal story. In it the ideas of “once upon a time” and my father’s writing life in old Chaguanas came together and penetrated my imagination, together with Charles Kingsley’s story of Perseus (a baby cast out to sea, a mother enslaved), which was the first story my father read to me; the early chapters of Oliver Twist; Mr. Murdstone from David Copperfield; Mr. Squeers. All this my father introduced me to. All this was added to my discovery of Port of Spain and the life of our street. It was the richest and most serene time of my childhood.

It didn’t last long. It lasted perhaps for two years. My mother’s mother decided to leave Chaguanas. She bought a cocoa estate of 350 acres in the hills to the northwest of Port of Spain, and it was decided— by the people in the family who decided on such matters—that the whole family, or all its dependent branches, should move there. My mother was willing enough to be with her family again. The rest of us were not so willing. But we had to go. We had to leave the house in Port of Spain. After the quiet and order of our two years as a separate unit we were returned to the hubbub of the extended family and our scattered nonentity within it.

The intention was good, even romantic. It was that the family should together work the rich and beautiful estate. It was more the idea of the commune than a continuation of the extended family life of Chaguanas, where most people had their own land and houses and used the family house as a center. Here we all lived in the estate house. It was a big house, but it wasn’t big enough; and the idea of communal labor turned out to be little more than the exaction of labor from the helpless.

In Chaguanas the family had been at the center of a whole network of Hindu reverences. People were always coming to the Chaguanas house to pay their respects, to issue invitations, or to bring gifts of food. Here we were alone. Unsupported by that Chaguanas world, with no one outside to instruct us in our obligations, even to ourselves, our own internal reverences began to go; our Hindu system began to fail.

There were desperate quarrels. Animosities and alliances shifted all the time; people had constantly to be looked at in new ways. Nothing was stable. Food was short, transport to Port of Spain difficult. I didn’t see my father for days. His nerves deteriorated. He had been given one of the servant rooms (we children slept anywhere). In that room one Sunday evening, in a great rage, he threw a glass of hot milk. It cut me above my right eye; my eyebrow still shows the scar.

After two years we moved back to the house in Port of Spain, but only to some rooms in it. There was a period of calm, especially after my father got a job with the government and left the Guardian. But we were under pressure. More and more people from my mother’s family were coming to Port of Spain, and we were squeezed into less and less space. The street itself had changed. On the reclaimed area of Docksite there was the American base; and at least one of the houses or yards had become a kind of brothel ground.

Disorder within, disorder without. Only my school life was ordered; anything that had happened there I could date at once. But my family life—my life at home or my life in the house, in the street—was jumbled, without sequence. The sequence I have given it here has come to me only with the writing of this piece. And that is why I am not sure whether it was before the upheaval of our move or after our return to Port of Spain that I became aware of my father writing stories.

In one of the drawers of the desk there was a typescript—on Guardian “copy” paper—of a story called “White Man’s Way.” It was an old story and it didn’t mean much to me. A white overseer on a horse, a girl in a cane field: I cannot remember what happened. I was at sea with this kind of story. For all my reputation in the house as a reader of books—and my interest in books and magazines as printed objects was genuine—there was an element of pretense, a carry-over from the schoolroom, in much of the reading I did on my own. It was easier for me to take an interest in what my father read to me. And my father never read this story aloud to me.

I remember that in the story there was a phrase about the girl’s breasts below her bodice; and I suppose that my father had grafted his sexual yearnings onto an English or American magazine-style tropical story. In the desk, hoarded with his other papers, there was a stack of these magazines, often looked at by me, never really read. My father had done or partly done a correspondence course with a London writing school before the war—some of the letters were in the desk. The school had recommended a study of the “market.” These magazines were the market.

But “White Man’s Way” was in the past. The stories my father now began to write were aimed at no market. He wrote in fits and starts. He wrote in bed, with a pencil. He wrote slowly, with great patience; he could write the same paragraph over and over again. Liable to stomach pains, and just as liable to depressions (his calls then for “the Epictetus” or “the Marcus Aurelius,” books of comfort, were like calls for his stomach medicine), my father became calm before and during his writing moods.

He didn’t write a great deal. He wrote one long story and four or five shorter stories. In the shorter pieces my father, moving far from my mother’s family and the family of his uncle by marriage, re-created his own background. The people he wrote about were poor, but that wasn’t the point. These stories celebrated Indian village life, and the Hindu rituals that gave grace and completeness to that life. They also celebrated elemental things, the order of the working day, the labor of the rice fields, the lighting of the cooking fire in the half-walled gallery of a thatched hut, the preparation and eating of food. There was very little “story” in these stories. But to me they gave a beauty (which in a corner of my mind still endures, like a fantasy of home) to the Indian village life I had never known. And when we went to the country to visit my father’s own relations, who were the characters in these stories, it was like a fairy tale come to life.

The long story was quite different. It was comic; yet it dealt with cruelty. It was the story of an Indian village thug. He is taken out of school at fourteen in order to be married: a boy of high caste, as the protagonist is, should be married before his whiskers grow. In the alien, Presbyterian school the boy is momentarily abashed by the idea of his early marriage; at home he is proud of the manhood this marriage confers. He terrorizes and beats his wife: strong men should beat their wives. Secure in his own eyes as a brahmin and the son of a landowner, he disdains work and seeks glory. He uses his father’s money and authority to establish and lead a village stick-fighting group, though he himself has no skill in that exacting and elegant martial art. None of this is done for gain; it is all done for glory, a caste idea of manhood, a wish for battle, a wish to be a leader. The quality of the ambition is high; the village setting is petty. The would-be caste chieftain ends in the alien police courts as an uneducated country criminal, speaking broken English.

I was involved in the slow making of this story from the beginning to the end. Every new bit was read out to me, every little variation; and I read every new typescript my father made as the story grew. It was the greatest imaginative experience of my childhood. I knew the story by heart, yet always loved to read it or hear it, feeling a thrill at every familiar turn, ready for all the varied emotions. Growing up within my extended family, knowing nothing else, or looking at everything else from the outside, I had no social sense, no sense of other societies; and as a result, reading (mainly English books) was difficult for me. I couldn’t enter worlds that were not like mine. I could get on only with the broadest kind of story, the fairy tale. The world of this story of my father’s was something I knew. To the pastoral beauty of his other stories it added cruelty, and comedy that made the cruelty just bearable. It was my private epic.

With the encouragement, and possibly the help, of my mother’s elder brother, my father printed the stories. That was another excitement. And then somehow, without any discussion that I remember, it seemed to be settled, in my mind as well as my father’s, that I was to be a writer.

On the American base at the end of the street the flag was raised every morning and lowered every evening; the bugle sounded twice a day. The street was full of Americans, very neat in their shiny starched uniforms. At night the soundtrack of the open-air American cinema thundered away. The man in the yard next door slaughtered a goat in his back gallery every Sunday morning and hung the red carcass up, selling pieces. This slaughtering of the goat was a boisterous business; the man next door, to attract customers, made it appear like a celebration of the holiday. And every morning he called out to the man in the servant room in our yard: “Bogart!” Fantasy calling to fantasy on our street. And in the two rooms to which we had been reduced, our fantasy was dizzier. I was eleven; I had given no sign of talent; but I was to be a writer.

On the window frame beside his bed, where he did his writing, my father had hung a framed picture of O. Henry, cut out from the jacket of the Hodder and Stoughton uniform edition. “O. Henry, the greatest short story writer the world has ever known.” All that I know of this writer to this day are the three stories my father read to me. One was “The Gift of the Magi,” a story of two poor lovers who, to buy gifts for each other, make sacrifices that render the gifts useless. The second story (as I remember it) was about a tramp who decides in a dream to reform and then wakes up to find a policeman about to arrest him. The third story—about a condemned man waiting to be electrocuted— was unfinished; O. Henry died while writing it. That unfinished story made an impression on me, as did the story of O. Henry’s own death. He had asked for the light to be kept on and had spoken a line from a popular song: “I don’t want to go home in the dark. ”

Poverty, cheated hopes, and death— those were the associations of the framed picture beside my father’s bed. From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father had read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction— the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives—that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in midsentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.

Our last two years in that house—our last two years in the extended family— were very bad indeed. At the end of 1946, when I was fourteen, my father managed to buy his own house. By that time my childhood was over; I was fully made.

The wish to be a writer didn’t go with a wish or a need actually to write. It went only with the idea I had been given of the writer, a fantasy of nobility. It was something that lay ahead, and outside the life I knew—far from family and clan, city, colony, Trinidad Guardian, Negroes.

In 1948 I won a Trinidad government scholarship. These scholarships were meant to give a man a profession and they could last for seven years. I decided to use mine to do English at Oxford. I didn’t want the degree; I wanted only to get away; and I thought that in my three or four scholarship years at Oxford my talent would somehow be revealed, and the books would start writing themselves.

My father had written little. I was aware now of the trouble he had finding things to write about. He had read little, was only a dipper—I never knew him to read a book through. His idea of the writer—as a person triumphant and detached—was a private composite of O. Henry, Warwick Deeping, Marie Corelli (of The Sorrows of Satan), Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, and J. R. Ackerley (of Hindoo Holiday). My own reading was not much better. My inability to understand other societies made nonsense of the Huxley and the D. H. Lawrence and the Evelyn Waugh I tried to read, and even of the Stendhal I had read at school. And I had written scarcely at all. If the O. Henry trick ending stood in the way of my father’s writing, Huxley and Lawrence and Waugh made me feel I had no material. But it had been settled that I was to be a writer. That was the career I was traveling to.

I left Trinidad in 1950. It was five years later, in the BBC freelances’ room, that I thought to write of the shout of “Bogart!” That shout came from a tormented time. But that was not how I remembered it. My family circumstances had been too confused; I preferred not to focus on them; in my mind they had no sequence. My narrator, recording the life of his street, was as serene as I had been when we had first moved to Port of Spain with my father.

At the end of the book my narrator left his street. I left them all and walked briskly towards the airplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac. That line, the last in the book, wrote itself. It held memories of the twelve years, no more, I had spent with my father. The movement of the shadows of trees and houses across the street—more dramatic to me than the amorphous shadows of Chaguanas—was one of the first things I had noticed in Port of Spain. And that was how I had left my father in 1950, not looking back. I wish I had. I might have taken away, and might still possess, some picture of him on that day. He died miserably—back at the tormenting Guardian—three years later.

To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave. Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge.

III

In 1977, after twenty-seven years, I saw Bogart again. He hadn’t been important in our family; he had always liked to hide; and for more than twenty years I had had no news of him. I had grown to think of him as a vanished person, one of the many I had left behind for good when I left Trinidad.

Then I discovered that he too had left Trinidad, and not long after I had left, not long after I had done the sign for his tailoring shop in Carenage. He had gone to Venezuela. There he had been for all this time. As a child, considering his disappearances and returns, I had divined his dreams (because they were also partly mine) of sensual fulfillment in another land and another language. And then, in the story I had devised for him in one afternoon, I had made him a bigamist. He had been part of my luck as a writer. My ignorance of his true story had been part of that luck. I had been free to simplify and work fast.

I was going now, in 1977, to spend some weeks in Venezuela. And when I passed through Trinidad I tried to get Bogart’s address. That wasn’t easy. He still apparently caused embarrassment to his close relations. And then there was some confusion about the address itself. The first address I was given was in the oil town of Maracaibo, in the west. The second was on the former pearl island of Margarita, three or four hundred miles to the east, on the Caribbean coast. That was like the old Bogart: a man on the move. He seemed, from this second address, to be in business in Margarita, as “international traders” or an “international trading corporation” or an “import-export corporation.”

Venezuela was rich, with its oil. Trinidad was now also rich, with the oil that had been discovered offshore. But when I was a child Trinidad was poor, even with the American bases; and Venezuela was a place to which people like Bogart tried to go-

Many went illegally. In a fishing boat it was a passage of a few hours, no more than a drift with the strong current, across the southern mouth of the Gulf of Paria. In the mixed population of the villages in the Orinoco delta, far from authority, Trinidadians who were protected could pass. Some acquired Venezuelan birth certificates; so it happened that men whose grandfathers had come from India sank into the personalities, randomly issued by the migration brokers, of Spanish mulattoes named Morales or Garcia or Ybarra.

These men didn’t go only for the money. They went for the adventure. Venezuela was the Spanish language, South America: a continent. Trinidad was small, an island, a British colony. The maps in our geography books, concentrating on British islands in the Caribbean, seemed to stress our smallness and isolation. In the map of Trinidad, the map which I grew to carry in my head, Venezuela was an unexplained little peninsula in the top lefthand comer.

True knowledge of geography, and with it a sense of historical wonder, began to come sixteen years after I had left Trinidad, when for two years I worked on a history of the region. For those two years— reading in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the London Library—I lived with the documents of our region, seeking to detach the region from big historical “overviews,” trying only to understand how my comer of the New World, once indeed new, and capable of developing in any number of ways, had become the place it was.

I saw the Gulf of Paria with the eyes of the earliest explorers and officials: I saw it as an aboriginal Indian lake, busy with canoes, sometimes of war. To those Indians, crossing easily back and forth, Trinidad was Venezuela in small. There was a mighty Caroni river in Venezuela; there was a small Caroni, a stream, in Trinidad. There was a Chaguaramas in Trinidad; there was a Chaguaramas in Venezuela.

Trinidad sat in the mouth of the Orinoco, beyond the “drowned lands” of the delta that Sir Walter Ralegh saw: now a refuge for people from the mainland, now a base for attack. To the Spaniards Trinidad guarded the river that led to El Dorado. When that fantasy faded, all that province of El Dorado—Trinidad and Guiana and the drowned lands—was left to bush. But the Indians were ground down. One day in the British Museum I found out about the name of my birthplace, Chaguanas.

Ralegh’s last, lunatic raid on “El Dorado” had taken place in 1617. Eight years later the Spaniards were settling accounts with the local Indians. On October 12, 1625, the King of Spain wrote to the Governor of Trinidad:

I asked you to give me some information about a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you say are above one thousand, and of such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they captured the town. Their crime hasn’t been punished because forces were not available for this purpose and because the Indians acknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know how you get on.

I felt that I was the first person since the seventeenth century to whom that document had spoken so directly. A small tribe, one among hundreds—and they had left behind only their name. The Chaguanas I knew was an Indian country town, Indian of India. Hindi-speaking Indians had simplified the name into a Hindu caste name, Chauhan. It had its Hindu districts and its Muslim districts; it had the religious and caste rivalries of India. It was where my mother’s father had bought many acres of cane land and rice land, and where he had built his Indian-style house. It was also where, from a reading of my father’s stories of village life, I had set my fantasy of home, my fantasy of things as they were at the very beginning: the ritualized day, fields and huts, the mango tree in the yard, the simple flowers, the lighting of fires in the evening.

Trinidad I knew too well. It was, profoundly, part of my past. That past lay over the older past; and I couldn’t, when I was in Trinidad again, see it as the setting of the aboriginal history I knew and had written about. But I had written about Venezuela and its waters without having seen them. The historical Venezuela—as it existed in my imagination—was vivid to me. And, when I went on to Venezuela from Trinidad in 1977, all that I saw as the airplane tilted away from the island was fresh and hallowed, the land and sea of the earliest travelers: the great froth-fringed stain of the Orinoco on the gulf, the more local, muddier stains of small rivers from the Paria Peninsula (the unexplained peninsula in the left-hand comer of the school map of Trinidad). In 1604, sixteen years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada he had led against England, the Duke of Medina Sidonia had been sent here by the King of Spain, to report on the best way of defending this coast and especially the saltpans of Araya (into which the Paria Peninsula ran, after 150 miles). Such a task! (And, when I got to know it later, such a desolation still, Araya, on its Caribbean coast: thorn trees and cactus in a hummocked red desert beside the murky sea, life only in the long, slack waves, the vultures in the sky, and the pelicans, all beak and belly and wings, undisturbed on their rock perches.)

To land at La Guaira airport, on the Venezuelan coast, was to come down to a different country. Scores of bulldozers were leveling the red earth to extend the airport. There were yachts in the marina beside the big resort hotel. The highway that led to Caracas in its inland valley had for stretches been tunneled through the mountains.

Venezuela was rich, and where it was rich it looked very new and busy. But in its oil economy many of its people were superfluous. The restaurants of the capital were Spanish or Italian, the hotels American. The technicians in the industrial towns that were being built in the interior were European; people spoke of a second Spanish conquest. Oil money—derived from foreign machines, foreign markets— fed a real estate boom in the towns. Agriculture was neglected; it was like something from the poor past. The descendants of the people who had been brought in long ago to restock the Indian land, to work the plantations, were no longer needed. Still pure Negro in the cocoa areas (fragrant with the scent of vanilla vines), old mulatto mixtures elsewhere, they had been abandoned with the plantations. And to travel out to the countryside was to see—on a continental scale—a kind of peasant dereliction that had vanished from Trinidad: shacks and a few fruit trees in small yards, rough little roadside stalls offering fruit from the yards.

It was in a setting like that, on the island of Margarita, in a setting close to what he had known in Trinidad, when I had painted the sign for him at Carenage, that I found Bogart.

Columbus had given Margarita its name, “the pearl.” It was across the sea from Araya, and early maps magnified its size. Pearl diving had used up the Indians fast, and there were no pearls now. Margarita lived as a resort island and a dutyfree zone: Venezuelans flew over from the mainland to shop. Half the island was desert, as red as Araya; half was green.

Bogart was in the green part. I had imagined, because I had understood he was in the import-export business, that he would be in one of the little towns. He was in a village, far from town or beach. It took some finding—and then suddenly in midaftemoon, a glaring, shadowless time, in a dusty rural lane, very local, with no sign of resort life or duty-free activity, I was there: little houses, corrugated-iron shacks, open yards, fruit trees growing out of blackened, trampled earth, their promise of a little bounty adding (to me, who had known such places as a child) to the feeling of dirt and poverty and empty days.

Bogart’s shop was a little concrete-walled building. Without the big sign painted on the wall I might have missed it. The two brown doors of the shop were closed. The side gate to the yard was closed.

In the neighboring yard, open, with no fence, in an unwalled shed attached as extra living space to an old, two-roomed wooden house, a bent old woman, not white, not brown, was taking her ease on a wooden bench: kerchiefed, long-skirted, too old now for siesta, existing at that moment only in a daze of heat, dullness, and old age, pans and plates on a table beside her, potted plants on the ground.

I banged for a long time on Bogart’s side gate. At last it opened: a mulatto girl of fifteen or sixteen or seventeen held it open. The old woman next door was swaddled in her long skirt; the light, loose frock of this girl was like the merest covering over her hard little body, and she was in slippers, someone at ease, someone at home. She was pale brown, well fed, with an oval face.

The questioning in her eyes vanished when she saw the taxi in the road. Her demeanor moderated, but only slightly, into that of a servant. She let me in without a word and then seemed to stand behind me. So that any idea that she might be Bogart’s daughter left me, and I thought of her as one of the superfluous, one of the many thousands littered in peasant yards and cast out into the wilderness of Venezuela.

The dirt yard over which the girl had walked in slippers was smooth and swept. At the back of the shop, and perpendicular to it, was a row of two or three rooms with a wide verandah all the way down. From one of these rooms Bogart soon appeared, dressing fast: I had interrupted his siesta. So that, though he was now a man of sixty or more, he was as I had remembered him: heavy-lidded, sleepy. He used to have a smoothness of skin and softness of body that suggested he might become fat. He still had the skin and the softness, but he hadn’t grown any fatter.

He called me by the name used by my family. I had trouble with his. I had grown up calling him by the Hindi word for a maternal uncle. That didn’t seem suitable now; but I couldn’t call him by his name either. In that moment of greeting and mutual embarrassment the girl disappeared.

He had got my telegram, he said; and he had sent a telegram in reply—but I hadn’t got that. He didn’t ask me into any of the back rooms or even the verandah. He opened up the back door of the shop. He seated me facing the dark shop—stocked mainly with cloth. He sat facing the bright yard. Even after twenty-seven years, I clearly wasn’t to stay long.

His voice was gruffer, but there was no trace of Venezuela in his English accent. The light from the yard showed his puffy, sagging cheeks and the black interstices of his teeth. That mouthful of apparently rotten teeth weakened his whole face and gave a touch of inanity to his smile.

His subject, after routine family inquiries, was himself. He never asked what I had done with my life, or even what I was doing in Venezuela. Like many people who live in small or retarded communities, he had little curiosity. His own life was his only story. But that was what I wanted to hear.

When he was a young man, during the war, he said, he had made a trip to Venezuela. He had become involved with a local woman. To his great alarm, she had had a child by him.

Bogart said, “But you knew that.”

I didn’t know it. Nothing had been said about Bogart’s misadventure. Our family kept its secrets well.

For some years after that he had divided his time between Trinidad and Venezuela, freedom and the woman. Finally—since there was no job for him in Trinidad—he had settled in Venezuela. He had got a job with an oil company, and there he had stayed. That was the letdown for me: that Bogart, the adventurer, with his own idea of the Spanish Main, should have lived a life of routine for twenty-five years. He would still have been in that job, he said, if it hadn’t been for a malevolent Negro. The Negro, raised to a little authority and rendered vicious, tormented him. In the end Bogart left the job, with a reduced gratuity. He was glad to leave. That life hadn’t really been satisfactory, he said. The woman hadn’t been satisfactory. His children had been a disappointment; they were not bright.

Not bright! This judgment, from Bogart! It was astonishing that he could go back to an old way of thinking, that he could create this picture of his Venezuelan family as mulatto nondescripts. But he was also saying, obliquely, that he had left his wife and children on the mainland and had come to the island to make a fresh start. That explained the confusion about the two addresses. It also explained the demeanor of the mulatto girl, who wasn’t allowed to appear again.

He had been part of my luck as a writer; his simplicity had been part of that luck. Even as a child, I had divined his impulses. He wasn’t a bigamist, as I had made him in my story. But he had been caught by the senses; and now in old age he was seeking again the liberation he had been looking for when he had come to our street in Port of Spain.

But he was old now. He had begun to have some sense of life as an illusion, and his thoughts were turning to higher things—they had begun to turn that way when he was having trouble with the Negro. He didn’t know how to pray, he said. He had never paid attention to the pundits, our priests—he spoke apologetically, addressing me as someone whose family was full of pundits. But every morning, before he ate, he bathed and sat cross-legged and for half an hour he took the name of Rama—Rama, the Indo-Aryan epic hero, the embodiment of virtue, God himself, the name Gandhi had spoken twice after he had been shot.

After telling his story, old family graces seemed to return to Bogart. He hadn’t offered hospitality; now he offered anything in his shop. Shoddy goods, for the local market. I took a scarf, synthetic, lightweight material. And then it was close to opening time, and time for me to go

Outside, I studied the lettering on the shop wall. The paint was new; the sign writer’s rules and pencil outlines were still visible. Perhaps the sign I had done for him twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before had given him the taste for signs. This one was very big. Grandes Rebajas! Aprovichese! “Big Reductions! Don’t Miss Them!” The Spanish language: no romance in these workaday words now.

He had lived the life of freedom, and it had taken him back almost to where he had been in the beginning. But though he appeared not to know it, the Hindu family life he had wanted to escape from—the life of our extended family, our clan—had disintegrated in Trinidad. The family Bogart had known in my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain—neutered men, oppressed and cantankerous women, uneducated children—had scattered, and changed. To everyone there had come the wish to break away; and the disintegration of our private Hindu world—in all, we were fifty cousins—had released energy in people who might otherwise have remained passive. Many of my cousins, starting late, acquired professions, wealth; some migrated to more demanding lands.

For all its physical wretchedness and internal tensions, the life of the clan had given us all a start. It had given us a caste certainty, a high sense of the self. Bogart had escaped too soon; still passive, he had settled for nullity. Now, discovering his desolation, he was turning to religion, something that he thought was truly his own. He had only memories to guide him. His memories were not of sacred books and texts but of rituals, forms. So he could think only of bathing in the mornings, sitting in a certain posture, and speaking the name of Rama. It was less a wish for religion and old ritual, less a wish for the old life than a wish, in the emptiness of his Venezuela, for the consolation of hallowed ways.

Thinking of him, I remembered something I had seen eight years before in Belize, south of Yucatan, near the great ancient Mayan site of Altun Ha. The site, a complex of temples spread over four square miles, had been abandoned some centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The steep-stepped temples had become forested hills; and in the forest beside the main road there were still many unexcavated small hills, hard to see unless you were looking for them.

The priests of Altun Ha had been killed perhaps a thousand years before; there might have been a peasant uprising. That was the theory of the Canadian archaeologist who was living on the site in a tent marked with the name of his university. Not far away, on the edge of a government camp beside a stream, a Mayan peasant was building a hut. He had put up the pillars—trimmed tree branches—and the roof frame. Now he was marking out the boundary of his plot. It was an act that called for some ritual, and the man was walking along the boundary, swinging smoking copal in a wicker censer, and muttering. He was making up his own incantation. The words were gibberish.

When I got back to Caracas I found the telegram Bogart said he had sent me. SORRY BUT YOUR VISIT NOT POSSIBLE NOW AM IN AND OUT ALL THE TIME THESE DAYS IT’S ME ALONE HERE IN MARGARITA.

IV

The local history I studied at school was not interesting. It offered so little. It was like the maps in the geography books that stressed the islands and virtually did away with the continent. We were a small part of somebody else’s “overview”: we were part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story. Perhaps the school histories could be written in no other way. We were, after all, a small agricultural colony; and we couldn’t say we had done much. (The current “revolutionary” or Africanist overview is not an improvement; it is no more than the old imperialist attitude turned inside out.) To discover the wonder of our situation as children of the New World we had to look into ourselves; and to someone from my kind of Hindu background that wasn’t easy.

I grew up with two ideas of history, almost two ideas of time. There was history with dates. That kind of history affected people and places abroad, and my range was wide: ancient Rome (the study of which, during my last two years at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, was the most awakening part of my formal education); nineteenth-century England; the nationalist movement in India.

But Chaguanas, where I was born, in an Indian-style house my grandfather had built, had no dates. If I read in a book that Gandhi had made his first call for civil disobedience in India in 1919, that date seemed recent. But 1919 in Chaguanas, in the life of the Indian community, was almost unimaginable. It was a time beyond recall, mythical. About our family, the migration of our ancestors from India, I knew only what I knew or what I was told. Beyond (and sometimes even within) people’s memories was undated time, historical darkness. Out of that darkness (extending to place as well as to time) we had all come. The India where Gandhi and Nehru and the others operated was historical and real. The India from which we had come was impossibly remote, almost as imaginary as the land of the JRamayam, our Hindu epic. I lived easily with that darkness, that lack of knowledge. I never thought to inquire further.

My mother’s father had built a big house in Chaguanas. I didn’t know when. (It was in 1920; I was given that date in 1972.) He had gone back to India and died—in the life of our family, a mythical event. (It occurred in 1926.) Little by little I understood that this grandfather still had relations in India, that there was a village, with an actual address. My mother, giving me this address in 1961, recited it like poetry: district, subdistrict, village.

In 1962, at the end of a year of travel in India, I went to that village. I wasn’t prepared for the disturbance I felt, turning off from the India where I had been a traveler, and driving in a government jeep along a straight, dusty road to another, very private world. Two ideas of history came together during that short drive, two ways of thinking about myself.

And there I discovered that to my grandfather this village—the pond, the big trees he would have remembered, the brick dwellings with their enclosed courtyards (unlike the adobe and thatch of Trinidad Indian villages), the fields in the flat land, the immense sky, the white shrines—this village was the real place. Trinidad was the interlude, the illusion.

My grandfather had done well in Trinidad. He had bought much land—I continue to discover “pieces” he had bought; he had bought properties in Port of Spain; he had established a very large family and in our community he had a name. But he was willing, while he was still an active man, to turn his back on this and return home, to the real place. He hadn’t gone alone—a family secret suddenly revealed: he had taken another woman with him. But my grandfather hadn’t seen his village again; he had died on the train from Calcutta. The woman with him had made her way to the village (no doubt reciting the address I had heard my mother recite). And there for all these years, in the house of my grandfather’s brother, she had stayed.

She was very old when I saw her. Her skin had cracked; her eyes had filmed over; she moved about the courtyard on her haunches. She still had a few words in English. She had photographs of our family—things of Trinidad—to show; there remained to her the curious vanity that she knew us all very well.

She had had a great adventure. But her India had remained intact; her idea of the world had remained whole; no other idea of reality had broken through. It was different for thousands of others. In July and August 1932, during my father’s first spell on the Trinidad Guardian (and around the time I was born), one of the big running stories in the paper was the repatriation of Indian immigrants on the SS Ganges.

Indian immigrants, at the end of their contract, were entitled to a small grant of land or to a free trip back to India with their families. The promise hadn’t always been kept. Many Indians, after they had served out their indenture, had found themselves destitute and homeless. Such people, even within my memory, slept at night in the Port of Spain squares. Then, in 1931, the Ganges had come, and taken away more than a thousand. Only “paupers” were taken free; everyone else had to pay a small fare. The news, in 1932, that the Ganges was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the Ganges as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad. Many more wanted to go than could be taken on. A thousand left; a quarter were officially “paupers.” Seven weeks later the Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the passengers, the Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.

Our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream. Of my mother’s father, so important to our family, I grew up knowing very little. Of my father’s family and my father’s childhood I knew almost nothing. My father’s father had died when my father was a baby. My father knew only his mother’s stories of this man: a miserly and cruel man who counted every biscuit in the tin, made her walk five miles in the hot sun to save a penny fare, and, days before my father was born, drove her out of the house. My father never forgave his father. He forgave him only in a story he wrote, one of his stories of Indian village life, in which his mother’s humiliation is made good by the ritual celebration of the birth of her son.

Another incident I knew about—and my father told this as a joke—was that at one time he had almost gone back to India on an immigrant ship. The family had been “passed” for repatriation; they had gone to the immigration depot on Nelson Island. There my father had panicked, had decided that he didn’t want to go back to India. He hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind about the trip back to India.

This was what my father passed on to me about his family and his childhood. The events were as dateless as the home events of my own confused childhood. His early life seemed an extension back in time of my own; and I did not think to ask until much later for a more connected narrative. When I was at Oxford I pressed him in letters to write an autobiography. This was to encourage him as a writer, to point him to material he had never used. But some deep hurt or shame, something still raw and unresolved in his experience, kept my father from attempting any autobiographical writing. He wrote about other members of his family. He never wrote about himself.

It wasn’t until 1972, when I was forty, and nearly twenty years after my father’s death, that I got a connected idea of his ancestry and early life.

I was in Trinidad. In a Port of Spain shop one day the Indian boy who sold me a paper said he was related to me. I was interested, and asked him how—the succeeding generations, spreading through our small community, had added so many relations to those I had known. He said, quickly and precisely, that he was the grandson of my father’s sister. The old lady was dying, he said. I should try to see her soon. I went the next morning.

Thirty years before, her house in the open country near Chaguanas had been one of the fairy-tale 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 deathbed 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 molded into any expression save one of great weariness—the old lady used her shriveled 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. 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 labor.)

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 fulfill 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.

V

The managing editor of the Trinidad Guardian from May 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.”

MacGowan 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 humor. 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 London 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 makeup 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 multiracial 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 laborer. Field labor, 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 sugarcane 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 Maqueripe 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 London 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 textbooks 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 LlBELS 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 from the New York Herald Tribune of June 24, 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.)

Here were printed records. Here, in the sequence in which they had fallen in the mornings on the front steps of the Port of Spain house, were the Guardians of 1938 and 1939, once looked at without being understood: the photographs of scholarship winners (such lucky men), the sports pages (with the same, often used photographs of great cricketers), the cinema advertisements that had awakened such longing (Bobby Breen in Rainbow on the River).

And then, going back, I rediscovered parts of my father’s ledger. I found that the ledger I had grown up with was not complete. My father had left out some things. The clipping Shenker had sent me told a true story. It was a bigger story than I had imagined, and it was not comic at all. It was the story of a great humiliation. It had occurred just when my father was winning through to a kind of independence, and had got started in his vocation. The independence was to go within months. The vocation—in a colonial Trinidad, without MacGowan—was to become meaningless; the vacancy was to be with my father for the rest of his life.

I had known about my father’s long nervous illness. I hadn’t known about its origins. My own ambitions had been seeded in something less than half knowledge of my father’s early writing life.

VI

My father, when I got to know him, was full of rages against my mother’s family. But his early writings for the Guardian show that shortly after his marriage he was glamoured by the family. They were a large brahmin family of landowners and pundits. Nearly all the sons-in-law were the sons of pundits, men with big names in our own private world, our island India. Caste had won my father admittance to the family, and for some time he seemed quite ready, in his Guardian reports, to act as a kind of family herald. POPULAR HINDU ENGAGEMENT CHAGUANAS LINK WITH AROUCA. MacGowan couldn’t have known, but this item of “Indian” news was really a family circular, court news: it was about the engagement of my grandmother’s eldest granddaughter.

With the departure of my mother’s father for India, and his subsequent death, the direction of the family had passed to the two eldest sons-in-law. They were brothers. They were ambitious and energetic men. They were concerned with the establishing of the local Hindu-Muslim school; with the affairs of the local road board; and—in those days of the property franchise—with the higher politics connected with the island legislative council. They were also, as brahmins of the Tiwari clan, defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith—against Presbyterianism, then making converts among Hindus, and also against those reforming Hindu movements that had sent out missionaries from India. The brothers sought to be leaders; and they liked a fight. They were engaged in constant power games, which sometimes took a violent turn, with other families who also presumed to lead.

To belong to the family was to be in touch with much that was important in Indian life; or so my father made it. And in MacGowan’s Guardian, Indian news became mainly Chaguanas news, and Chaguanas news was often family news. 600 AT MASS MEETING TO PROTEST THE ATTITUDE OF CIPRIANI. That was news, but it was also a family occasion: the meeting had been convened by the two senior sons-in-law. And when three days later the Chaguanas correspondent reported that feeling against Cipriani (a local politician) was still so strong that an eleven-year-old boy had been moved to speak “pathetically” at another public gathering, MacGowan couldn’t have known that the boy in question was my mother’s younger brother. (He became a Reader in mathematics at London University; and thirty years after his “pathetic” speech he also became the first leader of the opposition in independent Trinidad.)

My father might begin a political item like this: “At a surprise meeting last night... ” And the chances were that the meeting had taken place in the “hall,” the big downstairs room in the wooden house at the back of the main family house in Chaguanas.

But this closeness to the newsmakers of Chaguanas had its strains. The family was a totalitarian organization. Decisions— about politics, about religious matters, and, most important, about other families—were taken by a closed circle at the top—my grandmother and her two eldest sons-in-law. Everyone in the family was expected to fall into line; and most people did. There was something like a family propaganda machine constantly at work. It strengthened approved attitudes; it could also turn inwards, to discredit and humiliate dissidents. There was no plan; it simply happened like that, from the nature of our family organization. (When the two senior sons-in-law were eventually expelled from the family, the machine was easily turned against them.) And even today, when I meet descendants of families who were once “blacked” by my mother’s family, I can feel I am in the presence of the enemy. To grow up in a family or clan like ours was to accept the ethos of the feud.

But what could be asked of a member of the family couldn’t be asked of the reporter. The family had been strong supporters of the sitting member for the county in the legislative council. This man was a Hindu, and he was as good a legislator as the colonial constitution of the time permitted. Suddenly, perhaps for some Hindu sectarian reason, or because of a squabble over the running of the Hindu-Muslim school, our family decided to drop this man. They decided that at the next election, in 1933, they would support Mr. Robinson, who was a white man and the owner of large sugar estates in the area.

Mr. Robinson believed in child labor, and his election speeches were invariably on this subject. He thought that any law that raised the school-leaving age to fourteen would be “inhuman.” He was ready to be prosecuted “a thousand times,” he was ready to go to jail, rather than stop giving work to the children of the poor. One of our family’s ruling sons-in-law made a similar speech. Mr. Robinson, he said, was keeping young people out of jail.

It would not have been easy for my father, whose brother had gone to work as a child in the fields for eight cents a day, to be wholeheartedly on the family’s side. But he tried; he gave a lot of attention to Mr. Robinson. Then my father had to report that the two sons-in-law had been charged with uttering menaces (allegedly, a “death threat”) against someone on the other side.

Mr. Robinson lost the election. This was more than political news. This was a family defeat, which, because it was at the hands of another Hindu family, was like a family humiliation; and my father had to report it in the jaunty Guardian style. The day after the election there was a riot in Chaguanas. A Robinson crowd of about a thousand attacked a bus carrying exultant supporters of the other side. The bus drove through the attacking crowd; a man in the crowd was killed; a man in the bus had his arm tom off; the police issued seventy summonses. That also had to be reported. And it would not have been at all easy for my father to report that—after another violent incident—the two senior sons-in-law of the family had appeared in court and had been fined. The family house was on the main road. Only a few hundred yards away, in a cluster, were the official buildings: the railway station, the warden’s office, the police station, and the courthouse. The reporter would have had no trouble getting his story and returning, as it were, to base.

So my father’s position in the family changed. From being the reporter who could act as family herald, he became the reporter who got people into the paper whether they wanted it or not; he became a man on the other side.

And, in fact, in one important way my father had always been on the other side. The family, with all its pundits, were defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith. My father wasn’t. Later—just ten years later— when we were living in Port of Spain and our Hindu world was breaking up, my father was to write lyrically about Hindu rituals and Indian village life. But when he was a young man this Indian life was all he knew; it seemed stagnant and enduring; and he was critical. He was not alone. He belonged, or was sympathetic, to the reforming movement known as the Arya Samaj, which sought to make of Hinduism a pure philosophical faith. The Arya Samaj was against caste, pundits, animistic ritual. They were against child marriage; they were for the education of girls. On both these issues they clashed with the orthodox. And even smaller issues, in Trinidad, could lead to family feuds. What was the correct form of Hindu greeting? Could marriage ceremonies take place in daylight? Or did they, as the orthodox insisted, have to take place at night?

It was as a reformer that my father had presented himself to MacGowan. And he had been encouraged by MacGowan: a “controversial” reporter was better for the paper, and MacGowan’s attitude to Indians was one of paternal concern. And it was as a reformer that my father tackled the Indian side of the paralytic rabies story.

There had been a recrudescence of the disease in the weeks following the election, and Hindus were still not having their cattle vaccinated. One reason was that the government charge was too high—twenty-four cents a shot, at a time when a laborer earned thirty cents a day. But there was also a strong religious objection. And in some villages, as a charm against the disease, there was a ceremony of sacrifice to Kali, the black mother-goddess. Women went in procession through five villages, singing, and asking for alms for Kali. With the money they got they bought a goat. On the appointed day the goat was garlanded, its head cut off, and its blood sprinkled on the altar before the image of the goddess.

This was the story my father wrote, a descriptive piece, naming no names. But the reformer could not stay his hand: he spoke of “superstitious remedies” and “amazing superstitious practices,” and that was how MacGowan played it up. Ten days later—what deliberations took place in those ten days?—my father received an anonymous threatening letter in Hindi. The letter said he was to perform the very ceremony he had criticized, or he was going to die in a week.

There is an indication, from my father’s reporting of the incident, that the threat came from within the ruling circle of the family, perhaps from one of the senior sons-in-law. This man, at any rate, when approached, offered no help and seemed anxious only to confirm the contents of the letter. And, in the abasement that was demanded of my father, there is something that suggests family cruelty: as though the reporter, the errant family member, was to be punished this time for all his previous misdemeanors and disloyalties.

In the week that followed my father existed on three planes. He was the reporter who had become his own very big front-page story: “Next Sunday I am doomed to die.” He was the reformer who wasn’t going to yield to “jujus”: “I won’t sacrifice a goat.” At the same time, as a man of feud-ridden Chaguanas, he was terrified of what he saw as a murder threat, and he was preparing to submit. Each role made nonsense of the other. And my father must have known it.

He wasn’t going to sacrifice a goat to Kali. But then the readers of the Guardian discovered that he had made the sacrifice— not in Chaguanas but in a little town a safe distance away.

A young English reporter, Sidney Rodin, who had been brought out recently by MacGowan to work on the Guardian, wrote the main story. It was a good piece of writing (and Rodin was to go back to London, to a long career in Fleet Street). Rodin’s report, full of emotion, catches all the details that must have horrified my father: the goat anointed and garlanded with hibiscus; red powder on its neck to symbolize its own blood, its own life; the cutlass on the tree stump; the flowers and fruit on the sacrificial altar.

My father, in Rodin’s account, is, it might be said, a little to one side: a man who (unknown to Rodin) had been intended by his grandmother and mother to be a pundit, now for the first time going through priestly rites; a man in white, garlanded like the goat with hibiscus, offering sacrificial clove-scented fire to the image of the goddess, to the still living goat, to the onlookers, and then offering the severed goat’s head on a brass plate.

My father, in his own report accompanying Rodin’s story, has very little to say. He has no means of recording what he felt. He goes back to the reformist literature he has read; he plagiarizes some paragraphs. And he blusters. He will never sacrifice again, he says; he knows his faith now. And he records it as a little triumph that he didn’t wear a loincloth: he went through the ceremony in trousers and shirt. The odd, illogical bluster continues the next day, on the front page of the Sunday paper. MR. NAIPAUL GREETS You!—No POISON LAST NIGHT. “Good morning, everybody! As you behold, Kali has not got me yet... ”

It was his last piece of jauntiness from Chaguanas. Two months later he worked on a big hurricane story, but that was in the south of the island. His reports from Chaguanas became intermittent, and then he faded away from the paper.

A few months later MacGowan left Trinidad. There was an idea that my father might go with MacGowan to the United States; and he took out a passport. But my father didn’t go. Dread of the unknown overcame him, as it had overcome him when he was a child, waiting on Nelson Island for the ship to take him to India. The passport remained crisp and unused in his desk, with his incomplete ledger.

He must have become unbalanced. It was no help when the new editor of the Guardian took him off the staff and reduced him to a stringer. And soon he was quite ill.

I said to my mother one day when I came back from the Port of Spain newspaper library, “Why didn’t you tell me about the sacrifice?”

She said simply, “I didn’t remember.” She added, “Some things you will yourself to forget.”

“What form did my father’s madness take?”

“He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.”

The house where this terror befell him became unendurable to him. He left it. He lived in many places, many little towns, dependent now on my mother’s family, now on the family of his wealthy uncle by marriage. For thirteen years he had no house of his own.

My mother blamed MacGowan for the disaster. It gave her no pleasure to hear the name my father spoke so often or to follow MacGowan’s later adventures. In 1942 we read in Time magazine that MacGowan, then nearly fifty, had gone as a war correspondent on the Dieppe raid and had written his story immediately afterwards, keeping himself awake (a MacGowan touch) on Benzedrine. And the Guardjan, relenting towards its former editor, reported in 1944 that MacGowan had been taken prisoner by the Germans in France but had managed to escape, jumping off a train.

I understand my mother’s attitude, but it isn’t mine. It was no fault of MacGowan’s that he had the bigger world to return to, and my father had only Trinidad. MacGowan transmitted his own idea of the journalist’s or writer’s vocation to my father. From no other source in colonial Trinidad could my father have got that. No other editor of the Guardian gave my father any sense of the worth of his calling. It was the idea of the vocation that exalted my father in the MacGowan days. It was in the day’s story, and its reception by a sympathetic editor, that the day’s struggle and the day’s triumph lay. He wrote about Chaguanas, but the daily exercise of an admired craft would, in his own mind, have raised him above the constrictions of Chaguanas: he would have grown to feel protected by the word, the quality of his calling. Then the props went. And he had only Chaguanas and Trinidad.

Admiration of the craft stayed with him. In 1936, in the middle of his illness—when I would have been staying in Chaguanas at my mother’s family house— he sent me a little book, The School of Poetry, an anthology, really a decorated keepsake, edited by Alice Meynell. It had been marked down by the shop from forty-eight cents to twenty-four cents. It was his gift to his son of something noble, something connected with the word. Somehow the book survived all our moves. It is inscribed: “To Vidyadhar, From his father. Today you have reached the span of 3 years 10 months and 15 days. And I make this present to you with this counsel in addition. Live up to the estate of man, follow truth, be kind and gentle and trust God.”

Two years later, when my father got his Guardian job back, we moved to the house in Port of Spain. It was for me the serenest time of my childhood. I didn’t know then how close my father was to his mental illness; and I didn’t understand how much that job with the Guardian was for him a daily humiliation. He had had to plead for the job. In the desk were the many brusque replies, which I handled lovingly and often for the sake of the raised letterheads.

Among the books in the bookcase were the books of comfort my father had picked up during his four lost years: not only Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, but also many mystical or quasi-religious books. One healing incantation from the time of his illness I got to know, because he taught it to me. It was a line he had adapted from Ella Wheeler Wilcox: “Even this shall pass away.” It was an elastic consolation. It could deal with the pain of a moment, a day, life itself.

He never talked about the nature of his illness. And what is astonishing to me is that, with the vocation, he so accurately transmitted to me—without saying anything about it—his hysteria from the time when I didn’t know him: his fear of extinction. That was his subsidiary gift to me. That fear became mine as well. It was linked with the idea of the vocation: the fear could be combated only by the exercise of the vocation.

And it was that fear, a panic about failing to be what I should be, rather than simple ambition, that was with me when I came down from Oxford in 1954 and began trying to write in London. My father had died the previous year. Our family was in distress. I should have done something for them, gone back to them. But, without having become a writer, I couldn’t go back. In my eleventh month in London I wrote about Bogart. I wrote my book; I wrote another. I began to go back.