India by V. S. Naipaul Page A

spaces of Bombay dwellings. The design found favour; it was adopted by all the leading furniture-manufacturers of Bombay. Mr Raote also specialized in study units that doubled as room-dividers. The pieces hemade were all his own designs: the ideas just came to him. The moment I started working in the furniture business I thought of these things.’ He also made doors. He had made all the doors in his flat, and designed and made all the decorated teak architraves. The flat was a special kind of triumph for him, a proof of his success and a demonstration of his talent. There was much in it I had taken for granted and only now, with his help, began to see.
    His success grew. He began to do woodwork for big buildings on subcontract; and then he thought he would go into the building business itself. Two years after he had started making furniture, he put up his first big building in partnership. Though his journey had seemed long to him, he was at that time only thirty-three. Since then he had done 15 or 16 big projects.
    ‘But in all my business I have tried, as a member of the Shiv Sena, to accommodate the middle-class Maharashtrian. So, instead of becoming a multi-millionaire as a builder, I prefer to follow the path of the leader, to follow the principles he has laid down.’
    This devotion to the Shiv Sena and its leader was like an aspect of Mr Raote’s religion. He had always had courage, and confidence, the gift of religion, the
atma-vishwas
of which Mr Patil of Thane had spoken.
    ‘In my rise, my falls, whatever the problems, I faced them boldly, whether as a businesman or social worker or head of a family. Up to the time of my college days I had my father pushing me on. Then in 1964 I came across the great saint who had set up his ashram at Alibagh.’
    This was the guru whose picture was in the corner of the sitting room and at the back of the shrine in the puja room. Mr Raote, from what he said now, had come in contact with him in the year he had had the great disappointment of not being able to go to the engineering college at Sholapur.
    ‘I used to go to see him for his blessing. I never asked anything of him. I went to him only for his blessing, to serve him because he was a saint, and I feel he changed my entire life. He died in 1968. But I feel he is still blessing me whenever I need his blessing. Though he is not here physically, in the actual body, he always gives me and my family his presence. Look,’ Mr Raote said, taking me to the teak front door of his flat. ‘My door has no latch. It is always open.’
    I had caught Mr Raote just in time to get the end of his story.Though, when we were making our arrangements, he had told me nothing about it, it turned out now that I had caught him, that second morning, on the very day he was going off to his ashram for nine days. He was going alone, without his wife.
    ‘I go every year, without fail. These nine days of my year I cannot give to anybody else.’
    He had done other pilgrimages. He and his wife had been six times to the cave of Amarnath in Kashmir, 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, where – an ancient miracle of India – every year in the summer an ice phallus formed, symbol of Shiva, waxing and waning with the moon.
    He said, ‘I love that Himalayan place.’
    The worldly man who wanted to be an officer and an engineer, the Sena worker, the devout Hindu: there were three layers to him, making for a chain of belief and action.
    Papu, the young Jain stoockbroker, speaking of the Shiv Sena, one of the many components of the threat around him, said, ‘All our problems are economic. We wouldn’t have a problem if we didn’t have an economic problem.’
    He was taking me that afternoon – after trading on the stock exchange had ceased – to see where he lived, and especially to see the slum by which he was surrounded. Dharavi, as its name was, was a famous slum. There were people in Bombay who claimed, with a certain amount of pride, that it was the