Read Online A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul - Free Book Online

crumbling chutes. After a day of river and sun and forest and Indian faces, the narrator is startled to see two almost naked white boys with bows and the small Indianarrows hiding behind the grass and boulder at the water’s edge. Not the arrows of the craft shops on the coast: the real arrows, from the forest. For a moment or two it is like being taken back to the beginning of things. Before white skins turned another colour, and yellow hair turned black.
    There is no mystery: the children are from the new settlement in the clearing. They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected.
    The narrator will stay for a few days here. The settlement is not his final destination. He will rest, take guides and go on. He will have to go on foot. The river cannot be navigated beyond this point. Beyond this are the boulders and the shallow rapids.
    The settlement is the site of a religious mission. It is a newish religion, with a Christian basis. It has established itself in the country, both on the coast, where its followers are African, and in the interior, where it is getting Amerindian converts.
    On the coast, among the Africans, it is even popular, because it promotes the idea of voluntary service as a two-way traffic, a form of international exchange. This means that the local country doesn’t simply receive foreign volunteers. Favoured local people who accept the religion can be sent abroad as service volunteers, to Europe, the United States, Canada, and even West Africa. Since few people on the coast have the means to travel (and most of the black population want to migrate to northern countries), there are any number of Africans, among them the relatives and friends of local politicians, who want to be volunteers and go abroad.
    So the church has some authority and, in this country which is officially hostile to white people, the service volunteers who come from abroad have a good deal of freedom. These are the people who have been infiltrated by the revolutionaries. The disguise is almost perfect. Both groups have the same kind of dedication; both talk about racial brotherable;both talk about the wastefulness of the rich and the exploitation of the poor; and both deal in the same stern idea of imminent punishment and justice.
    The narrator is one of these infiltrators. Who the others are at this mission station he doesn’t know. They will declare themselves to him in time. Now, at this moment of arrival, shouldering his rucksack, allowing himself to be marched off as a prisoner by the boys with the bows and deadly little Indian arrows, he is concerned to act only as a religious volunteer.
    He is led to a cabin in the centre of the clearing. It is a rough timber cabin, but it is on tree-branch pillars about four feet high, and it easily dominates the other, smaller cabins which are flat on the rough ground. The clearing is still littered with the finer debris of felled trees, still with the marks of bush-clearing fires, and the salty smell of those fires. On three sides the forest wall, with many tall, thin, white-trunked trees close together, looks freshly exposed.
    The narrator is expecting some kind of welcome, after his long journey. But the heavy white man, in jeans and washed-out tee-shirt, who comes out of the kitchen shed at the back of the central cabin, simply says to the boys, “Take the man to his house.” It is a foreign voice, central or eastern European, overlaid by American or Canadian intonation; and the narrator doesn’t know whether the abruptness has to do with the lack of language or whether it comes out of aggression. As the narrator walks away the man calls out: “Dinner here at five-thirty. That’s the rule here.”
    That gives the narrator just over an hour. The cabin to which he is taken is small and roughly floored. Four Indians are sitting or squatting on the floor, among their bundles. One is darning, one is making a toy (a tribal back-pack), and the other two are just