The Writer and the World Read Free Page B

deracinated and then rendered him weightless and futile. But he finally sees himself as “too much of a victim of that restlessness which was to have been my subject.” In a powerful sense, the great intellectual endeavour Singh hopes to begin one day is what his creator, Naipaul, though faced with much stronger odds, has completed over the last four decades, eloquently expressing, without being undermined by, the same worldwide turmoil and restlessness that, in 1945, Evelyn Waugh, secure until then within empire, had shrunk from.
    It is hard to think of a writer more fundamentally exilic, carrying so many clashing fading worlds inside him. But what’s more remarkable is that Naipaul’s acute sense of lost glory and contentment, his anguished perception of deception and tragedy—things inseparable from his background and experience—co-exist with an attitude of acceptance and optimism, with a well-founded faith in human striving and perfectibility. These visions aren’t usually compatible. But they work together in Naipaul, give his work its peculiar tension and richness, and make it the most sustained and wide-ranging meditation on our world.
    Pankaj Mishra

   INDIA   

In the Middle of the Journey
    C OMING from a small island—Trinidad is no bigger than Goa—I had always been fascinated by size. To see the wide river, the high mountain, to take the twenty-four-hour train journey: these were some of the delights the outside world offered. But now after six months in India my fascination with the big is tinged with disquiet. For here is a vastness beyond imagination, a sky so wide and deep that sunsets cannot be taken in at a glance but have to be studied section by section, a landscape made monotonous by its size and frightening by its very simplicity and its special quality of exhaustion: poor choked crops in small crooked fields, under-sized people, under-nourished animals, crumbling villages and towns which, even while they develop, have an air of decay. Dawn comes, night falls; railway stations, undistinguishable one from the other, their name-boards cunningly concealed, are arrived at and departed from, abrupt and puzzling interludes of populousness and noise; and still the journey goes on, until the vastness, ceasing to have a meaning, becomes insupportable, and from this endless repetition of exhaustion and decay one wishes to escape.
    To state this is to state the obvious. But in India the obvious is overwhelming, and often during these past six months I have known moments of near-hysteria, when I have wished to forget India, when I have escaped to the first-class waiting-room or sleeper not so much for privacy and comfort as for protection, to shut out the sight of the thin bodies prostrate on railway platforms, the starved dogs licking the food-leaves clean, and to shut out the whine of the playfully assaulted dog. Such a moment I knew in Bombay, on the day of my arrival, when I felt India only as an assault on the senses. Such a moment I knew five months later, at Jammu, where the simple, frightening geography of the country becomes plain—to the north the hills, rising in range after ascending range; to the south, beyond the temple spires, the plains whose vastness, already experienced, excited only unease.
    Yet between these recurring moments there have been so many others, when fear and impatience have been replaced by enthusiasm and delight, when the town, explored beyond what one sees from the train, reveals that the air of exhaustion is only apparent, that in India, more than in any other country I have visited, things are happening. To hear the sounds of hammer on metal in a small Punjab town, to visit a chemical plant in Hyderabad where much of the equipment is Indian-designed and manufactured, is to realize that one is in the middle of an industrial revolution, in which, perhaps because of faulty publicity, one had never really seriously believed. To see the new housing colonies in towns