Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

go to Canada, where his teachers came from. He even began to think he might adopt their religion and become like them and travel the world teaching. And one day, when he was asked to write an English “composition” about his holidays he pretended he was a Canadian, with parents who were called “Mom” and “Pop.” Mom and Pop had one day decided to take the kids to the beach. They had gone upstairs early in the morning to the children's room to wake them up, and the children had put on their new holiday clothes and they had driven off in the family car to the beach. The beach was full of holidaymakers, and the family had eaten the holiday sweets they had brought with them and at the end of the day, tanned and content, they had driven home. All the details of this foreign life—the upstairs house, the children's room—had been taken from American comic books which had been circulating in the mission school. These details had been mixed up with local details, like the holiday clothes and the holiday sweets, some of which Mom and Pop had at one stage out of their own great content given to half-naked beggars. This composition was awarded full marks, ten out of ten, and Willie was asked to read it out to the class. The other boys, many of whom lived very poor lives, had had no idea what to write about, and had not even been able to invent, knowing nothing of the world. They listened with adoration to Willie's story. He took the exercise book and showed it to his mother, and she was pleased and proud. She said to Willie, “Show it to your father. Literature was his subject.”
    Willie didn't take the book directly to his father. He left it on the table in the verandah overlooking the inner ashram yard. His father had coffee there in the morning.
    He read the composition. He was ashamed. He thought, “Lies, lies. Where did he get these lies from?” Then he thought, “But is it worse than Shelley and W and the rest of them? All of that was lies too.” He read the composition again. He grieved at his disappearance and thought, “Little Willie, what have I done to you?” He finished his coffee. He heard the first of the day's suppliants assembling in the main courtyard of his little temple. He thought, “But I have done him nothing. He is not me. He is his mother's son. All this Mom-and-Pop business comes from her. She can't help it. It's her background. She has these mission-school ambitions. Perhaps after a few hundred rebirths she will be more evolved. But she can't wait like other decent folk. Like so many backwards nowadays, she wants to jump the gun.”
    He never mentioned the composition to Willie, and Willie never asked. He despised his father more than ever.
    One morning a week or so later, while his father was with clients on the ashram side of the house, Willie Chandran again left his composition exercise book on the table in the verandah of the inner courtyard. His father saw the book at lunchtime, and became agitated. His first feeling was that there was another offensive composition in the book, more about Mom and Pop. He felt the boy, true son of his mother, was challenging him, with all the slyness of a backward, and he wasn't sure what he should do. He asked himself, “What would the mahatma do?” He decided that the mahatma would have met this kind of sly aggression with his own kind of civil disobedience: he would have done nothing. So he did nothing. He didn't touch the exercise book. He left it where it was, and Willie saw it when he came back from school during the lunch hour.
    Willie thought in his head, in English, “He is not only a fraud, but a coward.” The sentence didn't sound right; there was a break in the logic somewhere. So he did it over. “Not only is he a fraud, but he is also a coward.” The inversion in the beginning of the sentence worried him, and the “but” seemed odd, and the “also.” And then, on the way back to the Canadian mission school, the grammatical