A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

to a calypso tent or, if it wasn’t the calypso season, a visit toa yard connected with one of the ecstatic local African sects, Shango or the Shouters.
    There would be a well-connected local guide in the background. He had acted as guide for other writers and knew the Trinidad drill. Apart from him—and he would be white or mulatto and slightly aloof—the local people were far away, figures in the background. Of these people anything could be said. The Africans who had been seen eating bananas by one writer might, by another writer, be put into two-toned shoes. They might be put into new and squeaky two-toned shoes; and the writer might go on to say that Africans were so fond of squeaky shoes that they took brand-new shoes to shoemakers and asked them to “put in a squeak.” As for the Indians of the countryside, they were a people apart; very little was known about their language or religion; and it was felt by the writer and his guide that this kind of knowledge didn’t matter.
    These books didn’t cause offence. Very few local people read them. Some of the more extravagant things—like the squeaks in the two-toned shoes—chimed in with the local African sense of humour, the calypso fantasy. And then—hard to imagine now—local people lived with the idea of disregard. You could train yourself to read through this disregard in books and find things that were useful to you.
    A book about Trinidad in the early 1930s had the pidgin or creole title
of If Crab No Walk.
It was by Owen Rutter, a name which has no other association for me. In his book Owen Rutter wrote this sentence: “The trains are all right, but the buses are a joke.” My father hung a whole article for a local magazine on these words of Owen Rutter’s. This would have been not long after I was born. Some years later—still a child—I came upon the magazine in my father’s desk. I was entranced by the article, with its comic drawings and its examples of the wit and nonsense destination-rhymes of local bus conductors. I looked at this article many times; Isuppose it was one of the things that helped to give me an idea of where I was. Without the Rutter book my father might not have seen that the local buses were something he could write about. So there is a kind of chain.
    I am not sure, but I believe it was words of Owen Rutter’s again that a local literary magazine put below a photograph of a Trinidad beach: “The desolate splendour of a palm-fringed beach at sunset.” That was set next to a photograph of a sunset sky with some words from Keats below it: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Beaches and sunsets were beautiful, of course; but those words of Keats (though they didn’t match the photograph, and were mysterious) and Rutter’s foreign witness were like an extra blessing.
    We were not alone in this need for foreign witness. Even someone like Francis Parkman, with all his Boston security, when he was on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, felt on occasion, in the splendour of the American wilderness, that in order to show himself equal to a particular scene he had to make some comparison to Italian painting, which at that time he would have known only in imperfect reproductions.
    Perhaps there is no pure or primal gift of vision. Perhaps vision can only be tutored, and depends on an ability to compare one thing with another. Columbus saw a fifteenth-century galley where I, standing on the other side, saw a tumble of black rocks with trees that I would not have been able to recognize in another setting. Not many hours after seeing that galley, he was sailing close to the southern coast of the island, and he saw aboriginal village gardens as fair as those of Valencia in the spring. It was a comparison he had made more than once before, about islands far to the north, which are physically quite different. But it was the only way he had of describing vegetation he hadn’t seen before, and it is all that we have of the