A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

Kanaima has come for Lucas. You know that. He must have told you. He told me he told you. And when kanaima came for Lucas, he said, ‘I will get away. I know that. I will go to England. My grandfather’s friend will send for me.’ And now you have come. Did Lucas tell you? They used to send clothes for my grandfather. Not our kind of clothes, but modern clothes, for the
houses
they were going to build. I still have some of them. Let me show you.”
    He undid the bundle beside him. A wild-banana leaf, cured in some way, with its browned ribs giving the effect of papyrus, was folded over the garment. He lifted out the material, fawn-coloured, perished, but recognizably a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred and fifty years before, relic of an old betrayal.

CHAPTER 4
Passenger:
A Figure from
the Thirties
    I THOUGHT THAT before I settled into the writing of this book I should go and look at old scenes. And, when I was in Trinidad, I did the longish drive one day to the north-easternmost point of the island, Point Galera, Galley Point. Columbus gave the name.
    An asphalt lane led off the main road to the Point itself. After the forest of the last few miles, the lane felt high and exposed. The light was harder; the asphalt looked very black; you could hear the wind and the sea. Half-stripped old coconut trees were on one side of the lane, untrimmed bush on the other side, with many young guava trees (no doubt seeded by birds, always overhead), and with a wind-blown drift of browned newspaper and bleached, flattened cardboard packets.
    At the end of the lane was a disused lighthouse. A little way up its cracked white bulk it was marked—in raised plaster or concrete—with a date, 1897, a simple diamond shape, and the letters VDJ. The letters stood for “Victoria Diamond Jubilee.” It was a double celebration: 1897 was not only the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria; it was also the centenary of the British conquest of Trinidad from the Spaniards.
    A path led down the broken cliff to the rocks the lighthouse used to warn against. Some young black men and boys (immigrants, legal and illegal, from the small islands to the north) were standing or sitting on the upper rocks and looking down at a man who, with a footing just above the spray, was fishing for baby shark, with the help of an assistant.
    The assistant stood a safer distance away, higher up and a little to one side of his principal, and took the strain of the line when a shark bit. The hooked shark looked small and playful in the white water between the rocks, really a baby, not strong or smart, not worth catching. But after it had been landed and killed it looked big and heavy, especially when the assistant—as serious as his master and the silent watchers (scattered about the rocks, as if for privacy, each watcher with his tight midday shadow)—lifted the shark on to his shoulder to take it up to where the rest of the catch was.
    Wind and beating sea, over the centuries, had caused the cliff to crumble at this Point. But plant life hung on wherever it could. A kind of grass had knitted itself together into depressions in the upper rocks. On rock formations a few hundred feet out in the sea, long ago cut off from the Point, strange-looking trees, wet with the spray, stunted and twisted by the wind, stood firm, and even now would have been screening the young trees that would in time replace them.
    I couldn’t have put a name to the trees. They were not part of the imported vegetation we knew very well, like the coconut, mango, breadfruit, bamboo. The trees on the rocks flourished where they did because they were native to those rocks, the Point, the island, the continent. And it occurred to me that, in spite of everything that had happened here, in spite of everything at our backs, what I was looking at was, miraculously, a version of the very first thing Columbus had seen after his crossing of the Atlantic on his third voyage: not the