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1
A Visit from Somerset
Maugham
*
Willie Chandran asked his
father one day, "Why is my middle name
Somerset? The boys at school have just found out,
and they are mocking me."
His father
said without joy, "You were named after a great
English writer. I am sure you have seen his books
about the house."
"But I haven't
read them. Did you admire him so
much?"
"I am not sure. Listen, and
make up your own mind."
And this was the
story Willie Chandran's father began to tell. It
took a long time. The story changed as Willie grew
up. Things were added, and by the time Willie left
India to go to England this was the story he had
heard.
*
The writer (Willie Chandran's
father said) came to India to get material for a
novel about spirituality. This was in the 1930s. The
principal of the maharaja's college brought him to
me. I was doing penance for something I had done,
and I was living as a mendicant in the outer
courtyard of the big temple. It was a very public
place, and that was why I had chosen it. My enemies
among the maharaja's officials were hounding me, and
I felt safer there in the temple courtyard, with the
crowds coming and going, than in my office. I was in
a state of nerves because of this persecution, and
to calm myself I had also taken a vow of silence.
This had won me a certain amount of local respect,
even renown. People would come to look at me being
silent and some would bring me gifts. The state
authorities had to respect my vow, and my first
thought when I saw the principal with the little old
white fellow was that it was a plot to make me talk.
This made me very obstinate. People knew that
something was afoot and they stood around to watch
the encounter. I knew they were on my side. I didn't
say anything. The principal and the writer did all
the talking. They talked about me and they looked at
me while they talked, and I sat and looked through
them like someone deaf and blind, and the crowd
looked at all three of us.
That was how it
began. I said nothing to the great man. It's hard to
credit now, but I don't believe I had heard about
him when I first saw him. The English literature I
knew about was Browning and Shelley and people like
that, whom I had studied at the university, for the
year or so I was there, before I foolishly gave up
English education in response to the mahatma's call,
and unfitted myself for life, while watching my
friends and enemies growing in prosperity and
regard. That, though, is something else. I will tell
you about it some other time.
Now I want to
go back to the writer. You must believe that I had
said nothing to him at all. But then, perhaps
eighteen months later, in the travel book the writer
brought out there were two or three pages about me.
There was a lot more about the temple and the crowds
and the clothes they were wearing, and the gifts of
coconut and flour and rice they had brought, and the
afternoon light on the old stones of the courtyard.
Everything the maharaja's headmaster had told him
was there, and a few other things besides. Clearly
the headmaster had tried to win the admiration of
the writer by saying very good things about my
various vows of denial. There were also a few lines,
perhaps a whole paragraph, describing--in the way he
had described the stones and the afternoon
light--the serenity and smoothness of my
skin.
That was how I became famous. Not in
India, where there is a lot of jealousy, but abroad.
And the jealousy turned to rage when the writer's
famous novel came out during the war, and foreign
critics began to see in me the spiritual source of
The Razor's Edge.
My persecution
stopped. The writer--to the general surprise, an
anti-imperialist--had, in his first Indian book, the
book of travel notes, written flatteringly of the
maharaja and his state and his officials, including
the principal of the college. So the attitude of
everybody changed. They pretended to see me as the
writer had seen me: the man of high caste, high in
the maharaja's revenue service, from a line of
people who had performed sacred rituals for the
ruler, turning his back on a glittering career, and
living as a mendicant on the alms of the poorest of
the poor.
It became hard for me to step out
of that role. One day the maharaja himself sent me
his good wishes by one of the palace secretaries.
This worried me a lot. I had been hoping that after
a time there might be other religious excitements in
the city, and I would be allowed to go away, and
work out my own way of life. But when during an
important religious festival the maharaja himself
came barebacked in the hot afternoon sun as a kind
of penitent and with his own hand made me offerings
of coconuts and cloth which a liveried courtier--a
scoundrel whom I knew only too well--had brought, I
recognised that breaking out had become impossible,
and I settled down to live the strange life that
fate had bestowed on me.
I began to attract
visitors from abroad. They were principally friends
of the famous writer. They came from England to
�nd what the writer had found. They came
with letters from the writer. Sometimes they came
with letters from the maharaja's high officials.
Sometimes they came with letters from people who had
previously visited me. Some of them were writers,
and months or weeks after they had visited there
were little articles about their visits in the
London magazines. With these visitors I went over
this new version of my life so often that I became
quite at ease with it. Sometimes we talked about the
people who had visited, and the people with me would
say with satisfaction, "I know him. He's a very
good friend." Or words like that. So that for
five months, from November to March, the time of our
winter or "cold weather," as the English
people said, to distinguish the Indian season from
the English season, I felt I had become a social
figure, someone at the periphery of a little foreign
web of acquaintances and gossip.
It sometimes
happens that when you make a slip of the tongue you
don't want to correct it. You try to pretend that
what you said was what you meant. And then it often
happens that you begin to see that there is some
truth in your error. You begin to see, for instance,
that to subtract from someone's good name can also
be said to detract from that name. In some such way,
contemplating the strange life that had been forced
on me by that meeting with the great English writer,
I began to see that it was a way of life that for
some years I had been dreaming of: the wish to
renounce, hide, run away from the mess I had made of
my life.
I must go back. We come from a line
of priests. We were attached to a certain temple. I
do not know when the temple was built or which ruler
built it or for how long we have been attached to
it; we are not people with that kind of knowledge.
We of the temple priesthood and our families made a
community. At one time I suppose we would have been
a very rich and prosperous community, served in
various ways by the people whom we served. But when
the Muslims conquered the land we all became poor.
The people we served could no longer support us.
Things became worse when the British came. There was
law, but the population increased. There were far
too many of us in the temple community. This was
what my grandfather told me. All the complicated
rules of the community held, but there was actually
very little to eat. People became thin and weak and
fell ill easily. What a fate for our priestly
community! I didn't like hearing the stories my
grandfather told of that time, in the
1890s.
My grandfather was skin and bones when
he decided he had to leave the temple and the
community. He thought he would go to the big town
where the maharaja's palace was and where there was
a famous temple. He made such preparations as he
could, saving up little portions of rice and flour
and oil, and putting aside one small coin and then
another. He told no one anything. When the day came
he got up very early, in the dark, and began to walk
to where the railway station was. It was very many
miles away. He walked for three days. He walked
among people who were very poor. He was more
wretched than most of them, but there were people
who saw that he was a starving young priest and
offered him alms and shelter. At last he came to the
railway station. He told me that he was by this time
so frightened and lost, so close to the end of his
strength and courage, that he was noticing nothing
of the world outside. The train came in the
afternoon. He had a memory of crowd and noise, and
then it was night. He had never travelled by train
before, but all the time he was looking
inward.
In the morning they came to the big
town. He asked his way to the big temple and he
stayed there, moving about the temple courtyard to
avoid the sun. In the evening, after the temple
prayers, there was a distribution of consecrated
food. He was not left out of that. It was not a
great deal, but it was more than he had been living
on. He tried to behave as though he were a pilgrim.
No one asked questions, and that was the way he
lived for the first few days. But then he was
noticed. He was questioned. He told his story. The
temple officials didn't throw him out. It was one of
these officials, a kindly man, who suggested to my
grandfather that he could become a letter-writer. He
provided the simple equipment, the pen and nibs and
ink and paper, and my grandfather went and sat with
the other letter-writers on the pavement outside the
courts near the maharaja's palace.
Most of
the letter-writers there wrote in English. They did
petitions of various sorts for people, and helped
with various government forms. My grandfather knew
no English. He knew Hindi and the language of his
region. There were many people in the town who had
run away from the famine area and wanted to get news
to their families. So there was work for my
grandfather and no one was jealous of him. People
were also attracted to him because of the priestly
clothes he wore. He was able after a while to make a
fair living. He gave up skulking about the temple
courtyard in the evenings. He found a proper room,
and he sent for his family. With his letter-writing
work, and with his friendships at the temple, he got
to know more and more people, and so in time he was
able to get a respectable job as a clerk in the
maharaja's palace.
That kind of job was
secure. The pay wasn't very good, but nobody ever
got dismissed, and people treated you with regard.
My father fell easily into that way of life. He
learned English and got his diplomas from the
secondary school, and was soon much higher in the
government than his father. He became one of the
maharaja's secretaries. There were very many of
those. They wore an impressive livery, and in the
town they were treated like little gods. I believe
my father wished me to continue in that way, to
continue the climb he had begun. For my father it
was as though he had rediscovered something of the
security of the temple community from which my
grandfather had had to flee.
But there was
some little imp of rebellion in me. Perhaps I had
heard my grandfather tell too often of his flight
and his fear of the unknown, only looking inward
during those terrible days and not able to see what
was around him. My grandfather grew angrier as he
grew older. He said then that in his temple
community they had been very foolish. They had seen
the disaster coming but had done nothing about it.
He himself, he said, had left it to the last moment
to run away; which was why, when he came to the big
town, he had had to skulk about the temple courtyard
like a half-starved animal. These were terrible
words for him to use. His anger infected me. I began
to have some idea that this life we were all living
in the big town around the maharaja and his palace
couldn't last, that this security was also false.
When I thought like that I could panic, because I
couldn't see what I could do to protect myself
against that breakdown.
I suppose I was ripe
for political action. India was full of politics.
But the independence movement didn't exist in the
maharaja's state. It was illegal. And though we knew
of the great names and the great doings outside we
saw them at a distance.
I was now at the
university. The plan was that I should get a BA
degree and then perhaps get a scholarship from the
maharaja to do medicine or engineering. Then I was
to marry the daughter of the principal of the
maharaja's college. All of that was settled. I let
it happen, but felt detached from it. I became idler
and idler at the university. I didn't understand the
BA course. I didn't understand The Mayor of
Casterbridge. I couldn't understand the people
or the story and didn't know what period the book
was set in. Shakespeare was better, but I didn't
know what to make of Shelley and Keats and
Wordsworth. When I read those poets I wanted to say,
"But this is just a pack of lies. No one feels
like that." The professor made us copy down his
notes. He dictated them, pages and pages, and what I
mainly remember is that, because he was dictating
notes and wanted them to be brief, and because he
wanted us to copy down these notes exactly, he never
spoke the name Wordsworth. He always said W,
speaking just the initial, never Wordsworth. W did
this, W wrote that...
Excerpted from Half a Life by
V. S. Naipaul
Copyright 2001 by V. S. Naipaul. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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