India by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

call it self-confidence.’ Nikhil gave the Marathi word he had used for ‘self-confidence’:
atma-vishwas
. That was Ganpati’s greatest gift.
    I said, ‘How did you take 101 coconuts up to the shrine?’
    ‘You can buy the nuts at the shrine itself.’
    He told me more about the Ganpati festival. Every year you had to get a new image from the image-maker. You kept the image at home for as long as you wanted, but at the end of the festival you had to throw away or immerse the image. It was the tradition in their family to keep the image for one day and a half; then they took it to a lake not far away and immersed it. It had been his mother’s ambition all her life to bring the Ganpati image home from the image-maker’s with a musical band. Recently, she had been able to do that. Her other son had got a very good job, and the family had hired a band and brought the image to the house, and they had had the band again when they had taken the image out of the house to the lake.
    With this talk of Ganpati, of shrines and pilgrimages and vowsand offerings, I began to get some idea of the mysteries the earth held for people like the Patils, the glory that sometimes touched their days, the wonders they walked through. There was more to their world than one saw. Thane was an industrial suburb. But the land itself was very old; it had its sanctity; and the same people could live naturally with many different ways of feeling.
    It was during this auspicious festival of Ganpati – right here, in this locality, in these lanes I had walked through seeing only the surface of things – that Mr Patil, when he was ten, had seen the poster about the visit of the leader of the Shiv Sena. He had gone to the meeting, to look at the leader. The leader at that time was running his own weekly magazine and was better known as a cartoonist. The young Patil boy didn’t find the leader physically impressive when he saw him. He saw a thin man, with glasses, in a buttoned-up long coat. But as soon as the leader began to speak the boy’s blood began to ‘boil’. The leader’s speech lasted 30 to 35 minutes, and at the end people like the young Patil, whose blood had boiled at the thought of all the injustices the true people of Maharashtra had to endure, began to shout their acclamation of the leader.
    ‘Weren’t you too young to understand talk about discrimination against Maharashtrians?’
    ‘No. I used to hear a lot about how the Muslims and outsiders were creating problems for Maharashtrians. I used to hear it at home and on the streets. My elder brother used to tell me about it.’
    ‘Your father?’
    ‘He had no interest in it at all.’
    The father didn’t have the security of his sons. It was as with Papu’s father.
    And though for a long time after this the ten-year-old boy had heard no more big Shiv Sena speeches, he began to lend a hand when the party wanted people to put up posters and banners. Later, when his father died, and he had gone out to work with the transistor company, he began to do political work for the party in the evenings. He continued to do that party work even when he found a new job. In the new job he was concerned with exporting manpower to Dubai and the Middle East. He got 950 rupees a month, as against 300 with the transistor company. He took people for interviews.
    Didn’t he want to go the Middle East himself, to make some money?
    ‘I didn’t pass my matric at school. So if I’d gone I would have had to do some menial work.’
    ‘You didn’t think there was anything wrong in sending people from here to a Muslim country?’
    ‘Not all Muslims are enemies.’
    His work for the party at that time was to sit in the Sena office in the evenings and listen to people’s complaints. The Sena always believed in the social side of things. There was a lot to be done that way. People needed help. Some people had water for only four hours a day. In many buildings water didn’t rise above the first floor.