The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,54

generations in a plantation colony of the New World. Yet there was another side to the man: he did not really participate in the life or rituals of that community. It wasn’t only that he was educated in the formal way of a school education; he was also skeptical. Unhappy in his extended family, he was distrustful of larger, communal groupings.

But that half-Indian world, that world removed in time and space from India, and mysterious to the man, its language not even half understood, its religion and religious rites not grasped, that half-Indian world was the social world the man knew. It was all that he had outside school and the life of the imagination fed by books and the cinema. That village world had given him its prejudices and passions; he was interested in, had been passionate about, the politics of India before and after independence. Yet he knew little about his community in Trinidad; he thought that because he belonged to it he understood it; he thought that the life of the community was like an extension of the life of his family. And he knew nothing of other communities. He had only the prejudices of his time, in that colonial, racially mixed setting. He was profoundly ignorant. He hadn’t been to a restaurant, hated the idea of eating food from foreign hands. Yet at the same time he had dreamed of fulfillment in a foreign country.

He looked for adventure. On this first day he found it. But he also came face to face with his ignorance. This ignorance undermined, mocked the writer, or the ambition of the writer, made nonsense of the personality the writer wished to assume—elegant, knowing, unsurprised. (Like Somerset Maugham. Or—a truer comparison—like the Trinidad Negro with the tight borrowed jacket in the hangar or shed at Puerto Rico, on his way to Harlem and quite another idea of glamour.)

So my memories of my arrival late at night in New York are vague. I think back hard now, and certain details become clearer: a very bright building, dazzling lights, a little crowd in a small space, a woman official with a very sharp “American” accent calling out the names of certain passengers.

There was a letter for me. A man from the British Consulate should have met me. But the plane had been so delayed he had gone home, leaving this letter, which gave me only the name of the hotel he had booked me into. He should have protected me. He left me at the mercy of the taxi driver who took me into the city. The driver cheated me, charged too much; and then, seeing how easily I acquiesced, he stripped me of the few remaining dollars I had on me (I had a few more, very few, hidden in my suitcase) by claiming them as a tip. I felt this humiliation so keenly that memory blurred it soon; and then eradicated it for many years.

I preferred to remember the taxi driver as being talkative, because that was the way taxi drivers were. I worked hard at remembering what he had said. (“We sold the Japs all our scrap metal and they shot it right back at us.”) And I remembered the Negro (he must have occurred in the hotel) who talked like a Negro in a book or film (“Dis city never sleeps” or “Dis city sho don’ sleep, man”) and whom I couldn’t tip because I had no money on me.

The talkative taxi driver, the quaintly spoken Negro—I cherished them because I felt I knew them, because I felt they were confirming so much of what I had read, were confirming so much of my advance information. They reassured me that I was indeed traveling, and was already in New York. And in their familiar aspect they were material, suitable for the writer. But the humiliation connected with each (the driver’s theft, my inability to tip the Negro, who was expecting me to play a character role too and give him a tip) got in the way; and they were edited out of my memory for twenty years. They were certainly edited out of the diary which I wrote with indelible pencil (already a little blunt) that evening in the hotel (on the hotel paper, for the extra drama).

A family farewell in the morning, thousands of miles away: a farewell to my past, my colonial past and peasant-Asiatic past. Immediately, then, the exaltation: the glimpse of the fields and the mountains