Free India by V. S. Naipaul Page B

religious in some ways and less religious in others.’
    ‘In what ways more religious?’
    ‘They offer namaaz five times a day. I offer namaaz only once.’
    Formal prayers five times a day – and yet, to Anwar and his father, that faith, obsessive as it was, was flawed.
    ‘Can you see yourself living without Islam?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What does it give you?’
    ‘Brotherhood. Brotherhood in everything. Islam doesn’t teach discrimination. It makes people help people. If a blind man is crossing the road, the Muslim doesn’t stop to find out what creed he belongs to. He just helps.’
    ‘What do you think will happen to your colony?’
    ‘I don’t see any solution.’
    ‘It will just go on as it is? You really think it will be the same when you reach your father’s age?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You don’t ever think of going away?’
    ‘At the moment I have no intention to do so.’
    ‘Are you a Sunni?’
    He looked surprised. He didn’t think that I would know about Sunnis. To him his faith was something secret, something outsiders couldn’t really know about.
    I wanted to know whether there were other Muslim groups or sects in his colony. I asked whether there were Ismailis or Ahmadis among them. He said he had never heard of those groups. Were there Shias?
    ‘There are no Shias in the community.’
    ‘Isn’t that strange?’
    ‘I don’t find it strange.’
    His orthodox faith was the one pure thing he had to hold on to. He couldn’t imagine life without it. It was a stringent faith. It shut out television; it had no room for heretics. All the many rules and celebrations and proscriptions were part of the completeness of Anwar’s world. Take away one practice, and everything was threatened; everything might start to unravel. It was correct, for instance, for Muslim men to pee squatting; and I heard later, from someone who worked with Anwar, that Anwar insisted on doing this at the modern urinals in his place of work, though it created problems for him.
    Many of the people one saw on the streets and in offices lived in a small space. From small spaces, every morning, they came out fresh and clean and brisk. Whole families, not slum-dwellers or pavement-dwellers, lived in one room; and they might live in the same room for a generation.
    Mr Raote had grown up in a family like that. He was one of the earliest members of the Shiv Sena; he had been among the 18 people, no more, at the very first Shiv Sena meeting in 1966. Now, with the victory of the Sena in the municipal elections, he was a man of authority, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Bombay Corporation. He had his own little office in the Victorian-Gothic Corporation building, with a waiting room and a secretaryand straight-backed chairs for people with petitions and needs. But he had lived for the first 28 years of his life in the one room where he had been born, in the suburb of Dadar, in mid-town Bombay.
    In Dadar Mr Raote now lived in the top flat of a tall block he had built himself, after he had turned developer in his thirties. But the tenement with the one room which had been his home for more than half his life was within walking distance, and he took me to see it one morning.
    We took the lift to the ground floor of his building, went out to the sandy front yard, went from the front to the back through a passage in the building, between shops with stylish signboards; and from the back walked to the next main road. Mr Raote was very well known; his walk created a little stir; people were respectful. It couldn’t have been open to many people to have the past (and a triumphant return to it) so accessible, just at the end of a short walk.
    We turned off, very soon, from the footpath of the main road into a yard with an old two-storey building. We went round to the back and went up the steps at the side of the building to a verandah or gallery at the top. This verandah (like the one on the lower floor) ran the length of the building, and