Area of Darkness (eBook)

These Antipodes call to one's mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our journey homewards, but now I find it, and all such resting-places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch.
Charles Darwin: Voyage of the Beagle

You've been reading the wrong books, the businessman said. But he did me an injustice. I had read any number of the books which he would have considered right. And India had in a special way been the background of my childhood. It was the country from which my grandfather came, a country never physically described and therefore never real, a country out in the void beyond the dot of Trinidad, and from it our journey had been final. It was a country suspended in time, it could not be related to the country, discovered later, which was the subject of the many correct books issued by Mr Gollancz and Messrs Allen and Unwin and was the source of agency dispatches in the Trinidad Guardian. It remained a special, isolated area of ground which had produced my grandfather and others I knew who had been born in India and had come to Trinidad as indentured labourers, though that past too had fallen into the void into which India had fallen, for they carried no mark of indenture, no mark even of having been labourers.

There was an old lady, a friend of my mother's family. She was jewelled, fair and white-haired, she was very grand. She spoke only Hindi. The elegance of her manner and the grave handsomeness of her husband, with his thick white moustache, his spotless Indian dress and his silence, which compensated for his wife 's bustling authority, impressed them early upon me as a couple who, though so friendly and close -- they ran a tiny shop not far from my grandmother's establishment -- as to be considered almost relations, were already foreign. They came from India, this gave them glamour, but the glamour was itself a barrier. They not so much ignored Trinidad as denied it, they made no attempt even to learn English, which was what the children spoke. The lady had two or three gold teeth and was called by everyone Gold Teeth Nanee, Gold Teeth Grandmother, the mixture of English and Hindi revealing to what extent the world to which she belonged was receding. Gold Teeth was childless. This probably accounted for her briskness and her desire to share my grandmother's authority over the children. It did not make her better liked. But she had a flaw. She was as greedy as a child, she was a great uninvited eater, whom it was easy to trap with a square of laxative chocolate. One day she noticed a tumbler of what looked like coconut milk. She tasted, she drank to the end, and fell ill, and in her distress made a confession which was like a reproach. She had drunk a tumbler of blanco fluid. It was astonishing that she should have drunk to the end, but in matters of food she was, unusually for an Indian, experimental and pertinacious. She was to carry the disgrace till her death. So one India crashed, and as we grew older, living now in the town, Gold Teeth dwindled to a rusticoddity with whom there could be no converse. So remote her world seemed then, so dead, yet how little time separated her from us!

Then there was Babu. Moustached, as grave and silent as Gold Teeth's husband, he occupied a curious position in my grandmother's household. He too was born in India, and why he should have lived alone in one room at the back of the kitchen I never understood. It is an indication of the narrowness of the world in which we lived as children that all I knew about Babu was that he was a kshatriya, one of...