Free The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul Page B

white-and-ochre town below there came the sound of a loudspeaker: cinemas announcing their attractions. In the late afternoon there was music: a wedding procession.
    The Ajmer calendar was full. On Saturday there was the eighty-ninth prize-giving of Mayo College, one of India’s important English-style public schools, founded for the education of the sons of princes. Three days later came the Hindu festival of Shivratri and the opening of the Ajmer Flower Show. So, quickly, after the disorder of the main street—the mixed traffic, the cows, the rubble, the dust, the exposed food-stalls—Ajmer revealed itself as excessively ordered. There was the railway town with its great locomotive workshops and its severely graded housing. There was the medieval, narrow-laned town around the famous Muslim shrine, an object of pilgrimage. There were the newer residential areas; there was the bazaar, an extension of the disorder of the main street; and there were the ordered acres of Mayo College, where only the servants’ quarters spoke of India.
    Beyond the brown hills were the smaller towns and the thousand villages that made up the constituency, each village as fragmented and ordered as Ajmer itself: every man in his caste, his community, his clan: divisions not strictly racial and not strictly social: more as if, in an English village, where everyone more or less looked alike, spoke the same language and had the same religion, every man yet remembered that he was a Dane or Saxon or Jute and stuck to his kind. Cow-and-calf,spinning-wheel: poor and rich, left and right: how could these divisions apply?
    In the evening I went to the Honeydew, one of the three recognizable cafés that Ajmer, with a population of 300,000, just about supports. It was air-conditioned and dim and the waiters were in white. A young man I fell in with told me that the Honeydew was for the young and “modern” of Ajmer. He spoke sardonically but he too wanted it known that he was modern. “My father was a semi-literate. He joined the Railways in 1920 and retired thirty-seven years later. Then he died. At the end of his life he was making three hundred rupees a month. For my father it was his luck, his
karma.
What he had sown in a past life he was reaping in this. I am not like that. I am only making four hundred. But let people look at my suit and tie and see me spending in the Honeydew and think I’m rich.”
    A cup of Honeydew coffee cost about three pennies. You could ask the waiter for a cigarette; he would place an open packet on your table and you paid only for those you took. Luxuries were small in India and little gestures were fundamental acts of defiance. To wear a tie, when money was immemorially scarce, to have a coffee in the Honeydew: that was more than extravagance. That was to deny one’s
karma
, to challenge the basis of one’s father’s faith.
    And it was of defiance that Mr. Desai, once Mrs. Gandhi’s Deputy Prime Minister, now in the opposition and supporting Mr. Mukut, was speaking in Naya Bazaar that evening. In the bazaar lanes the narrow shops, raised on platforms, glittered with electric light, tempting custom. In the wide open area of Naya Bazaar itself, beyond the heads of the crowd, beyond the flags and bunting and posters strung across the street, and at the end of two little colonnades of fluorescent tubes, there was another platform, very clean and very bright, and there—with Mr. Mukut and Mr. Kaul and others no doubt sitting at his feet—Mr. Desai, not looking his seventy-four years, was talking about “the Indira psychosis,” nationalization and the danger to the constitution.
    At first it seemed, to use the Indian word, “sophisticated.” But an election address, in that street, before that crowd, without an analysis of the distress that was so visible, without a promise for the future! An election address, about economic and legal matters, cast in terms of personal injury! And when Mr. Desai was talking of