A Way in the World Read Free Page A

the idea of difference began to attach to him, though I never stopped going to him for my clothes. It was Nazaralli Baksh who made the clothes I took with me when I went away to England.
    I heard later that a lot of his work was for the local police force; he made uniforms for them. For us who were his fellow Indians this would have been part of Nazaralli Baksh’s legend and success. Police Headquarters was just across the road from his shop. It was an important Port of Spain building. It was distinctive, with a high grey wall of stone and rubble. Later knowledge told me that it was a British colonial building in the Victorian Gothic style. At the time that rough grey front wall and those pointed reddish arches in the open galleries at the back seemed to be just what you would expect to find in Police Headquarters.
    A small town, a small street; but it took time to know. I had no interest in the law or lawyers, for instance, and for many years I paid no attention to that part of the street, opposite the courts, where the lawyers were. Then one day I went to the “chambers”—quaint word—of a famous black lawyer.
    This happened quite late, shortly after I had left school. I had been successful at school; it was known—people took an interest in these things—that I had won a scholarship and wasgoing to go abroad soon. The lawyer’s son had been right through school with me, and one day he said he wanted to take me to meet his father. We went to his father’s chambers. These chambers were in St. Vincent Street and occupied the whole of a very small house, a real Port of Spain miniature from the Spanish time. It would have been one of the earliest residential houses, built perhaps in the 1780s, not long after the city had been laid out. I suppose a number of these early houses were as small and squashed as they were because only short stretches of the streets had been made up; bush and plantations would have been quite close.
    The little front room of the chambers was full of black people, ordinary people, sitting very close together on two benches, bench facing bench across bare floorboards. The slats of the jalousies of the little front window were coated with dust from the street; you could see on the distempered walls where over the years the people on the benches had rested shoulders and heads. The people I saw were as silent and patient as people waiting for free medicine in a Health Office. Bright eyes, shining faces, reverential expressions: black people coming to one of their own, not minding the discomfort and the stillness and the wait, and not resenting the young boy who, just arrived, simply went into the inner room where the great man was. The atmosphere of the narrow little waiting room was new to me.
    In the more open, cooler room at the back the lawyer was in shirtsleeves, with his lawyer’s jacket on a hanger. The lawbooks and old folders with old papers, the general scruffiness of the chambers, the worm-eaten boards of the partition, made the lawyer’s profession seem a very dull one: it was hard to imagine that anything done in this room could generate real money.
    I didn’t know what to say to the lawyer, after the courtesies, which went on for a while. And he seemed equally at a loss; he seemed content just to look at me. I myself had a wish to look below the desk at the lawyer’s shoes. His sonhad told me, years and years before, when we were both in the fourth or fifth standard at the elementary school, that you could always tell a gentleman by the way he kept his shoes.
    My friend didn’t help with the conversation. His manner had altered in the inner office. He had become very much the son, the family treasure, the person who didn’t have to try. He seemed now to be more interested in finding a cold drink. He was very casual with the great lawyer.
    The lawyer was famous for his first name, which was Evander. And all I could think of, at this artificial moment, was to ask how he had been