The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online

children at the school. The administrator said:
    “But there are only twenty-five here.”
    “We have an attendance of a
hundred
and twenty-five.”
    “But there are only twenty-five here.”
    “What can you do, sahib?”
    Beyond the road some of the children not at school rolled in the dusty fields. Even with twenty-five children the two rooms of the school were full. In the third room, protected from sun and theft, were the teachers’ bicycles, as oiled and cared for as their masters.
    At the next school, a few miles down the road, the teacher was asleep in the shade of a tree, a small man stretched out on his tiny teacher’s table, his feet balanced on the back of the chair, so that he looked like a hypnotist’s subject. His pupils sat in broken rows on strips of matting that had been soaked and pressed into the earth and was of its colour. The teacher was so soundly asleep that though our jeep stopped about eight feet away from his table he did not immediately awaken. When he did—the children beginning to chant their lessons in the Indian fashion as soon as they saw us—he said he was not well. His eyes were indeed red, with illness or sleep. But redness disappeared as he came to life. He said the school had 360 pupils; we saw only sixty.
    “What is the function of a schoolteacher?”
    “To teach.”
    “But why?”
    “To create better citizens.”
    His pupils were in rags, unwashed except by snot, their hair, red from sun and malnutrition, made stiff and blond with dust.
    Two or three and stop.
The Hindi slogan on the walls of the family planning centre looked businesslike, but the centre itself was empty except for charts and more slogans and a desk and chair and calendar, and it was some time before the officer came out, a good-looking young man in white with a neat line moustache and a wrist-watch of Indian manufacture. He said he spent twelve days a month on family planning. He led discussions and “motivated” people to undergo vasectomy. The administrator asked:
    “How many people did you motivate last month?”
    “Three.”
    “Your target is one hundred.”
    “The people here, sahib, they laugh at me.”
    “How many discussions did you lead last month?”
    “One.”
    “How many people were there?”
    “Four.”
    “What were you doing when we came?”
    “I was taking food and a little rest.”
    “What did you do this morning?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Show me your diary.”
    Loose forms for travelling expenses fell out of his diary. The diary itself hadn’t been filled for two months. The young man had been holding down the job for two years; every month he drew 180 rupees.
    “Try to motivate me,” the administrator said. “Come on. Tell me why I should go in for family planning.”
    “To raise the standard of living.”
    “How would family planning raise the standard of living?”
    It was an unfair question, because concrete, and because it hadn’t been put to him before. He didn’t answer. He had only the abstraction about the standard of living.
    Birth control here; and, not so far away, the artificial insemination centre. A peasant sat on the concrete culvert of an abandoned flowerbed, holding his white cow by a rope. In a stall at the other end of the garden was the black zebu bull. Contraception, insemination: whatever the aim, nature was taking her own way in this district. It was clear what was about to happen wasn’t going to be artificial: the male villagers were gathering to watch. And the centre was well equipped. It had a refrigerator; it had all the obscene paraphernalia of artificial insemination. But the bull, the officer said, had lost its taste for artificial stimuli; which was not surprising. The bull itself was running down. Certain potent rations had been fixed for it by the authorities, but the rations hadn’t been collected. Seventy natural inseminations had taken place in the last year. But no one could tell the percentage of success, in spite of the ledgers