A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul Page B

when the pan was sufficiently heated the hakim put the poor tortoise in the pan or on the pan and pressed him down with his shoe. Sure enough, in this story, the tortoise urinated, and the urine was collected in another pan. Rahman was then sent to dig for three earthworms (three: Rahman is as precise as this, fifty or sixty years later). He brings the earthworms to the hakim, who (with a similar precision, and for an unstated reason) bakes only two and a quarter on the pan. From the mixture of the urine and the baked worm three tablets were made, and the patient (an assistant to a rich Hindu landowner) was told to swallow one tablet a day.
    He was cured, of course. But it did him no good. Part of the cure was that the patient should abstain from dairy products for six months. This was not easy in India, where milk and milk sweets, curds, and cottage cheese are important parts of the vegetarian diet. The patient somehow abstained. Until oneday, or late one evening, when he was tired and hungry after a day’s hard travel on a palanquin (carried by four men), he sent his servant to the bazaar to get something to eat. It was eleven; most of the market stalls were closed. The servant could only find a milk sweet. It cost four annas, something between a penny and twopence. The servant took it back to his famished master. The master was tempted. With the first mouthful of the delicious sweet he remembered what the hakim had said. He should have stopped, but he didn’t. He ate to the end and—this is an Indian story—began to prepare for his death.
    He straight away, that very night, told his overtaxed palanquin men to take him back home. When he got there he sent for the hakim. The hakim came and said he could do nothing: the eater of the milk sweet was going to die in two weeks. And then—in this Indian story—the hakim simply went away, leaving the patient to order his affairs and deal with things as best he could. Two weeks later the patient died. For Rahman this death (so accurately foretold), almost more than the earlier cure, was a proof of the gifts and splendour of the hakim.
    Rahman had earlier had a personal proof of the man’s talent. It was at the time when they were exercised about the tortoise urine and the three earthworms. It was a Sunday afternoon and Rahman, a boy of thirteen, was playing with some friends in the doorway of his family house. Rahman’s father and the hakim were sitting in the portico. Rahman’s father called him. Rahman went and sat in front of them. The hakim held Rahman’s hand, considered the boy’s palm and forehead, counted and assessed the lines, and prophesied the boy’s future. Rahman’s father was awed. To have your future toldlike that, by a hakim, was to be marked and blessed; and Rahman’s father raised his arms to the sky and called on Allah in gratitude.
    Rahman’s India is full of this kind of wonder, where some men can go behind the play of events and study the workings of fate. The wonder of the seer follows the wonder of the healer; and in the background are the stupendous rituals of both religions. The effect is of an enticing, brightly coloured place where anything might happen; a man has only to let himself go. In Rahman’s view of the world Satan led one astray; Allah rescued one. So the devout man was always protected, and never had to live with the consequences of his actions.
    When he was seventeen, and in the middle school, in a hostel far from home, Rahman decided, with a friend of the other religion, the nephew of a temple priest, to run away. In the hostel he had to cook for himself. He hated cooking; it blighted his days; he couldn’t get the peace of mind he needed to study, and he couldn’t sleep properly. In this mood he went home for a five-day school break. He slept next to his father; it was their custom. He saw that his father was keeping a moneybag under his pillow; he found out that the