India by V.S. Naipaul Page A

expected, but the kitchen was as clean and ordered as though for inspection. Brass and silver and metal vessels glittered on one shelf; tins were neatly ranged on the shelf below that. And – another sign of modernity, of the new age – from a nail on the wall a transistor radio hung by its strap.
    The woman or girl at the fireplace rose, fair, well mannered in the Indian way, and brought her palms together. She was the Patel’s daughter-in-law. And the Patel (still remaining unknown) was too grand to boast of her attainments. That he could leave to the others, his admirers and hangers-on. And the others did pass on the news about the daughter-in-law of this wealthy man. She was a graduate!Though lost and modest in the gloom of the kitchen, stooping over the fire and the smoke, she was a graduate!
    The back door of the kitchen opened onto the back yard; and we were in the bright sun again, in the dust, at the edge of the village, the rocky land stretching away. As so often in India, order, even fussiness, had ended with the house itself. The back yard was heaped with this and that, and scattered about with bits and pieces of household things that had been thrown out but not quite abandoned. But even here there were things to show. Just a few steps from the back door was a well, the Patel’s own, high-walled, with a newly concreted base, and with a length of rope hanging from a weighted pole, a trimmed and peeled tree branch. A rich man indeed, this Patel, to have his own well! No need for him to buy water from the restaurant man and waste grain on
chapattis
no one wanted. And the Patel had something else no one in the village had: an outhouse, a latrine! There it was, a safe distance away. No need for him or any member of his family to crouch in the open! It was like extravagance, and we stood and marvelled.
    We re-entered the house of grain and food and graduate daughter-in-law – still at her fireplace – and walked back, around the drying grain in the courtyard, to the front vestibule. We went up the steps set in the front wall to the upper storey. It was being refloored: interwoven wooden strips laid on the rafters, mud on that, and on the mud thin slabs of stone, so that the floor, where finished, though apparently of stone, was springy.
    Little low doors led to a narrow balcony where, in the centre, in what was like a recessed shrine, were stone busts, brightly painted, of the Patel’s parents. This was really what, as guests, we had been brought up to the unfinished top floor to see. The
nagari
inscription below the busts said that the house was the house of the Patel’s mother. The village honoured the Patel as a rich man and a Master; he made himself worthy of that reverence, he avoided hubris, and at the same time he made the reverence itself more secure, by passing it backward, as it were, to his ancestors. We all stood before thebusts – bright paint flattening the features to caricature – and looked. It was all that was required; by looking we paid homage.
    Even now I wasn’t sure who, among the elderly men with us, was the Patel. So many people seemed to speak for him, to glory in his glory. As we were going down again, I asked the engineer. ‘What is the value of this house? Is that a good question to ask?’ He said, ‘It is a very good question to ask.’ He asked for me. It was a question only the Patel himself could answer.
    And the Patel, going down the steps, revealed himself, and his quality, by evading the question. If, he said, speaking over his shoulder, the upper flooring was completed in the way it had been begun – the wood, the mud plaster, the stone slabs – then the cost of that alone would be sixty thousand rupees, six thousand dollars. And then, downstairs, seating us, his guests, on the visitors’ platform, on the blue-covered modern sofa and the bed with the embroidered bedspread, he seemed to forget the rest of the question.
    Tea was ordered, and it came almost at once. The