Read Online In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul - Free Book Online Page B

mind. He sat with me. Time became real again. I felt a great love for him. Soon I could have laughed at his agitation. And later, indeed, we laughed together.
    I said, ‘Sahib, you must excuse me this morning. I want to go for a walk. I will come back about tea time.’
    He looked hard at me, and we both knew I had spoken truly.
    ‘Yes, yes, Santosh. You go for a good long walk. Make yourself hungry with walking. You will feel much better.’
    Walking, through streets that were now so simple to me, I thought how nice it would be if the people in Hindu costumes in the circle were real. Then I might have joined them. We would have taken to the road; at midday we would have halted in the shade of big trees; in the late afternoon the sinking sun would have turned the dust clouds to gold; and every evening at some village there would have been welcome, water, food, a fire in the night. But that was a dream of another life. I had watched the people in the circle long enough to know that they were of their city; that their television life awaited them; that their renunciation was not like mine. No television life awaited me. It didn’t matter. In this city I was alone and it didn’t matter what I did.
    As magical as the circle with the fountain the apartment block had once been to me. Now I saw that it was plain, not very tall, and faced with small white tiles. A glass door; four tiled steps down; the desk to the right, letters and keys in the pigeonholes; a carpet to the left, upholstered chairs, a low table with paper flowers in the vase; the blue door of the swift, silent elevator. I saw the simplicity of all these things. I knew the floor I wanted.In the corridor, with its illuminated star-decorated ceiling, an imitation sky, the colours were blue, grey and gold. I knew the door I wanted. I knocked.
    The
hubshi
woman opened. I saw the apartment where she worked. I had never seen it before and was expecting something like my old employer’s apartment, which was on the same floor. Instead, for the first time, I saw something arranged for a television life.
    I thought she might have been angry. She looked only puzzled. I was grateful for that.
    I said to her in English, ‘Will you marry me?’
    And there, it was done.
    ‘It is for the best, Santosh,’ Priya said, giving me tea when I got back to the restaurant. ‘You will be a free man. A citizen. You will have the whole world before you.’
    I was pleased that he was pleased.
    *
    So I am now a citizen, my presence is legal, and I live in Washington. I am still with Priya. We do not talk together as much as we did. The restaurant is one world, the parks and green streets of Washington are another, and every evening some of these streets take me to a third. Burnt-out brick houses, broken fences, overgrown gardens; in a levelled lot between the high brick walls of two houses, a sort of artistic children’s playground which the
hubshi
children never use; and then the dark house in which I now live.
    Its smells are strange, everything in it is strange. But my strength in this house is that I am a stranger. I have closed my mind and heart to the English language, to newspapers and radio and television, to the pictures of
hubshi
runners and boxers and musicians on the wall. I do not want to understand or learn any more.
    I am a simple man who decided to act and see for himself, andit is as though I have had several lives. I do not wish to add to these. Some afternoons I walk to the circle with the fountain. I see the dancers but they are separated from me as by glass. Once, when there were rumours of new burnings, someone scrawled in white paint on the pavement outside my house:
Soul Brother. I
understand the words; but I feel, brother to what or to whom? I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed