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

some of the bodies had been put in the Red House vault, near the entrance to which I had for some weeks had my table while I wrote out copies of birth and death certificates. How true the stories were I don’t know. But when the rebels had surrendered, and the siege was over, and the local papers carried photographs (taken from far away) of people leaving the Red House with handkerchiefs to their noses, I remembered the smell of the fish glue in which I had worked; and thought of the dimly lit, airless, oddly quiet vault, full of paper, where I had been told all the records of the British colony were stored, all the records, that is, since 1797, records of surveys and property transactions and then the records, starting later, of births and deaths, together with a copy of everything that had been printed in the colony.
    I was told that the smell of death lingered for days in that area where, thirty-five years or so before, the fathers and grandfathers of some of the rebels (many were very young, boys in their teens) might have once partaken of the sacrament of Woodford Square.
    I had never thought of St. Vincent Street—so calm and quiet in my first memory of it—as a place where men might fight so desperately. But all scenes of human habitation are touched by violence of this kind. Nearly every town has been besieged and fought over and has known this kind of blood. And as soon as I thought back, even to my own nerves at the time of my first return from England, I saw that there was an immense chain of events. You could start with the sacrament of the square and work back: to the black madmen on the benches, the Indian destitutes, the plantations, the wilderness, the aboriginal settlements, the discovery. And you could move forward from that exaltation and that mood of rejection to the nihilism of the moment.
    As soon as the siege began there was no effective government. It took a little while for this to be understood; and then the effect on black communities—local and immigrant, in the capital and all those contiguous settlements at the foot of the Northern Range, north of the mainly Indian countryside, which remained quiet, untouched by the frenzy to the north—the effect on these communities was extraordinary. They were like people who had been granted a moment of pure freedom. They formed looting gangs. It was of this—of the inflamed, unrecognizable faces of the looters, the glittering eyes—as much as of the siege at the Red House that people spoke when I went back. For six days or so whole communities had lived with the idea of the end of things, a world without logic, and they had been lifted out of themselves. At least twenty-nine people died during this looting.
    For many years I had accepted that the city I had known as a child no longer existed and what was there now belonged to others. Nazaralli Baksh, who had made the clothes I had gone away in, had ceased for some time to be a name in St. Vincent Street. But to see the destruction around where his shop had been was to be reminded of him more than ever. Across the road, the Victorian Gothic Police Headquarters—he used to make uniforms for them—had been blasted in at one side. The grey outer wall, where it still stood, was blackened; smoke had poured out of the pointed arches. It was unsettling to see what had been city—regulated, serviced, protected, full of wonder and the possibility of adventure—turn to vacancy, simple ground. The commercial streets of the centre had been levelled. You could see down to what might have been thought buried forever: the thick-walled eighteenth-century Spanish foundations of some buildings. You could see the low gable marks of early, small buildings against higher walls. You could look down, in fact, at more than Spanish foundations: you could look down at red Amerindian soil.
    There had been blood here before. Where the shacks of immigrants now scaffolded the hillsides there had once been aboriginal people. The