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

sympathy for the Indian cause, and lessen the possibility of outside intervention.
    The narrator is relieved to be moving on. The missionStation is oppressive to him, because of the Czech couple, and because of the glumness of the Indians. For this the narrator blames the Czechs. There is nothing like joy in the Czechs. Authority, and being out of their setting, have only released appetite in them. It is this quality of appetite that has given them away to the narrator.
    There are daily religious services for the Indians; there are regulated hours of work. On some evenings in the open space in front of the big cabin—with a smoky brushwood bonfire (to keep away the insects) adding to the stale tobacco smell—television videos are shown. American thrillers, with a black slant. Not as harmless as they appear: they are part of the anti-African indoctrination of the Indians. The Indians are shocked by the guns and the fighting and the speeding cars; they sigh and call out. Sometimes, to break the tension, someone plays a flashlight on a black face; there is laughter; then many flashlights play on black faces on the screen; and the film is made harmless, becomes a film again, and animation makes the Indians like people with possibilities again.
    The guides eventually come. They are two young Indian boys, Lucas and Mateo. The narrator leaves with them one morning. One boy walks ahead of the narrator, one behind him.
    Soon they come to a wide forest trail, and there they are never absolutely alone. In the forest gloom it seems that there is always someone in the distance: someone always breaking out of the camouflage of leaves and shadow. Some of them are carrying big loads in their back-packs or back-panniers, models for the toys which the Indian in the narrator’s cabin had been making: a flat timber frame with flexible woven walls at the sides and the bottom, the walls laced up over the load with forest-made twine. A further cord or rope attaches both sides of the pannier to a band over the carrier’s forehead. So head and back bear the strain of the load. The carriers’ backs are bent, and at the same time they lean forward againstthe pull of the band on the forehead. It seems painful; the carriers are dwarfed by their loads; but it is a posture with a balance of forces—a posture that fits the device, which must have evolved over the centuries—and it enables the carriers to walk for hours.
    This forest trail is very old, the narrator reflects. How far back would it go? Would it go back to the colonization of the forest by the remote ancestors of these men? Or would some climatic change have intervened?
    When the porters or load-carriers (perhaps carrying their own things) pass, they grunt out greetings to Lucas and Mateo, and sometimes from below their taut forehead bands they look up at the narrator. Their faces are the faces of old men. The narrator thinks of the peasants and carriers in Japanese woodcuts; the resemblance is quite remarkable. And just as in woodcuts by Hokusai of rural scenes everything belongs—straw and roofs, trees and the timber of bridges—and nothing is imported, so here in this scene in which he is walking, almost everything belongs—except for the narrator himself, the clothes and canvas shoes of Lucas and Mateo, and the tins and sometimes the printed cardboard boxes in the carriers’ loads. A hundred years before, the narrator thinks, everything in this scene would have belonged; and a hundred years before that.
    They stop for a while to rest and eat and drink a little. Lucas and Mateo use their machetes to trim a place for the narrator to sit. As they walk on again, the narrator surrenders to the idea of the antiquity of the forest and this trail. He begins to wonder about the idea of time that men must have in this setting.
    When men know their world well; when they know every tree and flower; all the foods and poisons; all the animals; when they have perfected all their tools; when