Half a Life: A Novel by V.S. Naipaul

Author:V.S. Naipaul
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780375707285
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2002-10-08T01:45:05+00:00

Willie thought, “Please don't come, Sarojini. Please don't come.”

But in due course she came, and for three or four days she turned his life upside down. She stayed in a small hotel near the college—she had arranged that herself, before she left Germany—and she came every day to Willie's college room and prepared a rough little meal. She asked for his help in nothing. She bought cheap new pots and pans and knives and spoons, found out about greengrocers, came in every day with fresh vegetables, and cooked things on the little electric heater in Willie's room. She lay the heater on its back and she set the pots on the metal guards above the glowing electric coils. They ate off paper plates and she washed up the pots in the sink at the end of the corridor. Sarojini had never been a good cook, and the food she cooked in the college room was awful. The smell stayed in the room. Willie was worried about breaking the college rules, and he was just as worried about people seeing the dark little cook—clumsily dressed, with a cardigan over her sari and socks on her feet—who was his sister. In her new assertive way, but still not knowing too much about anything, in five minutes she would have babbled away all Willie's careful little stories about their family and background.

She said, “When you get this famous degree or diploma, what will you do with it? You will get a little teaching job and hide away here for the rest of your life?”

Willie said, “I don't think you know. But I've written a book. It's coming out next year.”

“That's a lot of nonsense. Nobody here or anywhere else will want to read a book by you. I don't have to tell you that. Remember when you wanted to be a missionary?”

“What I mean is that I feel I should wait here until the book comes out.”

“And then there'll be something else to wait for, and then there'll be something after that. This is your father's life.”

For days after she left the smell of her cooking was in Willie's room. At night Willie smelt it on his pillow, his hair, his arms.

He thought, “What she says is right, though I don't like her for saying it. I don't know where I am going. I am just letting the days go by. I don't like the place that's waiting for me at home. For the past two and a half years I have lived like a free man. I can't go back to the other thing. I don't like the idea of marrying someone like Sarojini, and that's what will happen if I go home. If I go home I will have to fight the battles my mother's uncle fought. I don't want to fight those battles. It will be a waste of my precious life. There are others who would enjoy those battles. And Sarojini is right in the other way too. If I get my teaching diploma and decide to stay here and teach it will be a kind of hiding away.

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