The Mimic Men: A Novel

  My reaction to my incompetence and inadequacy had been not to simplify but to complicate. For instance, I gave myself a new name. We were Singhs. My father’s father’s name was Kripal. My father, for purposes of official identification, necessary in that new world he adorned with his aboriginal costume, ran these names together to give himself the surname of Kripalsingh. My own name was Ranjit; and my birth certificate said I was Ranjit Kripalsingh. That gave me two names. But Deschampsneufs had five apart from his last name, all French, all short, all ordinary, but this conglomeration of the ordinary wonderfully suggested the extraordinary. I thought to compete. I broke Kripalsingh into two, correctly reviving an ancient fracture, as I felt; gave myself the further name of Ralph; and signed myself R. R. K. Singh. At school I was known as Ralph Singh. The name Ralph I chose for the sake of the initial, which was also that of my real name. In this way I felt I mitigated the fantasy or deception; and it helped in school reports, where I was simply Singh R. From the age of eight till the age of twelve this was one of my heavy secrets. I feared discovery at school and at home. The truth came out when we were preparing to leave the elementary school and our records were being put in order for Isabella Imperial College. Birth certificates were required.

  ‘Singh, does this certificate belong to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t see it from here.’

  Funny man. It says here Ranjit Kripalsingh. Are you he? Or have you entered the school incognito?’

  So I had to explain.

  ‘Ranjit is my secret name,’ I said. ‘It is a custom among Hindus of certain castes. This secret name is my real name but it ought not to be used in public.’

  ‘But this leaves you anonymous.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s where the calling name of Ralph is useful. The calling name is unimportant and can be taken in vain by anyone.’

  Such was the explanation I managed, though it was not in these exact words nor in this tone. In fact, as I remember, I stood close to the teacher and spoke almost in a whisper. He was a man who prided himself on his broad-mindedness. He looked humble, acquiring strange knowledge. We went on to talk about the Singh, and I explained I had merely revived an ancient fracture. Puzzlement replaced interest. At last he said, loudly, so that the others heard: ‘Boy, do you live by yourself?’ So, in kind laughter, the matter ended at school. But there remained my father. He was not pleased at having to sign an affidavit that the son he had sent out into the world as Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed into Ralph Singh. He saw it as an affront, a further example of the corrupting influence of Cecil and my mother’s family.

  I have given a flippant account of this episode. Flippancy comes easily when we write of past pain; it disguises and mocks that pain. I have no material hardships to record, as is clear. But observe how weighted down I was with secrets: the secret of my father, who was only an embittered schoolteacher, the secret of that word wife, the secret of my name. And to this was added a secret which overrode them all. It was the secret of being ‘marked’. From inquiries I have since made I believe this will be understood right away or not understood at all. I felt, to give my own symptoms, that I was in some way protected; a celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive. This knowledge gave me strength at difficult moments, but it remained my most shameful secret.

  So many secrets! I longed to be rid of them all. But it was difficult in Isabella. It was difficult at that school and with those boys. We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return. We denied the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors and windows, we who took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about visits to temperate farms. Whether we dissected a hibiscus flower or recited the names of Isabellan birds, school remained a private hemisphere.

  There was a boy called Hok in my class. I liked him for his looks, his intelligence, his slightly awkward body, his girl-like way of throwing a ball. He had long, well-articulated fingers which he was in the habit of rubbing together whenever he was nervous. I envied him his elegant manner, and I believe he envied me my manner. With Deschampsneufs I had belching matches. With Hok I had another sort of competition. The class had decided that we were both ‘nervous’; we each decided to be more nervous than the other. We might gaze at the ceiling during a lesson and not hear the master’s call to attend. We ate paper while we spoke. I couldn’t keep up with Hok here. He was a reckless eater, and once during a lesson ate a whole page of a textbook before remarking on its absence. I, aware of the occasional surveillance of my father the schoolmaster at home, had to be content with the odd corner. I began to chew my collar; Hok almost ate his off. I ate my school tie to rags; the end of Hok’s tie was never out of his mouth; he chewed it like gum. Between us was another bond. We were both secret readers of strange books. We often caught sight of one another in the Carnegie Library; then we became furtive or tried to hide, each unwilling to reveal the books he was interested in. But I found out about Hok. He was working his way through the Chinese section. His name indicated Chinese ancestry, but he was not pure Chinese. He had some admixture of Syrian or European blood with, I felt, a tincture of African. It was a happy blend; it had produced a sensitive, attractive boy.

  Sometimes our class was taken to the Training College, to give the learner-teachers there practice. In our crocodile we were the object of attention of various sorts, to the embarrassment and sometimes fury of our teacher. But in our crocodile we were also in our private hemisphere, and we walked through the streets of our city like disrespectful tourists, to whom everything that was familiar to the resident was quaint and a cause for mirth: a snatch of conversation, the shout of a vendor, a donkey-cart. We were enjoying the sights of our city in this way one morning when some of the boys began to titter and whip their fingers, calling the teacher’s attention.

  One boy said, ‘Sir, Hok went past his mother just now and he didn’t say anything at all to her.’

  The teacher, revealing unexpected depths, was appalled. ‘Is this true, Hok? Your mother, boy?’

  The crocodile came to a halt. Hok looked down at the pavement and went purple, rubbing his hands together. We looked for the mother, the hidden creature whom Hok saw every day, had said goodbye to that morning and was to see again in two hours or so at lunchtime. She was indeed a surprise, a Negro woman of the people, short and rather fat, quite unremarkable. She waddled away, indifferent herself to the son she had just brushed past, a red felt hat on her head, swinging her basket, doubtless bound for the market.

  ‘Hok!’ the teacher said. ‘Go and talk to your mother.’

  He blew a whistle and we all stood to attention, exaggerating the military posture, the more greatly to impress the onlookers, the native, the ordinary. Hok continued to look down at his shoes and rub his hands, scraping alternate palms with his fingers.

  ‘Hok, go this minute and talk to your mother!’

  She was receding serenely.

  Hok turned and began to walk towards her slowly. She was almost at the corner. Soon she would have disappeared.

  ‘Hok, run! Do you hear me? Run!’ And the teacher himself ran after Hok, threatening him with his tamarind rod.

  Hok shot off, running in his awkward girl’s way, and we who were secure and unbetrayed stood to attention and watched. We saw him gain on the dumpy little figure with the hat and the market basket, saw the figure, doubtless disturbed by the sound of running feet, turn in some agitation before Hok had caught up with her, saw the head inclining towards Hok, the black cartoon face to Hok’s purple, then saw them separate, the woman going round the corner, Hok turning and coming slowly back towards us, his purple face swollen as if about to burst, Hok the nervous, the secret rea
der, the eater of paper and ties, now totally betrayed and as ordinary as the street. The poor boy was crying.

  It was for this betrayal into ordinariness that I knew he was crying. It was at this betrayal that the brave among us were tittering. It wasn’t only that the mother was black and of the people, though that was a point; it was that he had been expelled from that private hemisphere of fantasy where lay his true life. The last book he had been reading was The Heroes. What a difference between the mother of Perseus and that mother! What a difference between the white, blue and dark green landscapes he had so recently known and that street! Between the street and the Chinese section of the Carnegie Library; between that placid shopping mother and the name of Confucius her son had earned among us for his wit and beauty. I felt I had been given an unfair glimpse of another person’s deepest secrets. I felt on that street, shady, with gardens, and really pretty as I now recall it, though then to me wholly drab, that Hok had dreams like mine, was probably also marked, and lived in imagination far from us, far from the island on which he, like my father, like myself, had been shipwrecked.

  I must explain. I cherished my mother’s family and their Bella Bella Bottling Works. But in my secret life I was the son of my father, and a Singh. China was the subject of Hok’s secret reading. Mine was of Rajputs and Aryans, stories of knights, horsemen and wanderers. I had even read Tod’s difficult volumes. I had read of the homeland of the Asiatic and Persian Aryans, which some put as far away as the North Pole. I lived a secret life in a world of endless plains, tall bare mountains, white with snow at their peaks, among nomads on horseback, daily pitching my tent beside cold green mountain torrents that raged over grey rock, waking in the mornings to mist and rain and dangerous weather. I was a Singh. And I would dream that all over the Central Asian plains the horsemen looked for their leader. Then a wise man came to them and said, ‘You are looking in the wrong place. The true leader of you lies far away, shipwrecked on an island the like of which you cannot visualize.’ Beaches and coconut trees, mountains and snow: I set the pictures next to one another.

  It was at these moments that I found the island most unbearable. Study the paradox of my fantasy. I looked about me minutely; I was pained. And I discovered I was more pained than most. I was driving with Cecil’s father one day along a country road. We were in the area of swamps. Sodden thatched huts, set in mud, lined the road. It was a rainy day, grey, the sky low and oppressive, the water in the ditches thick and black, people everywhere semi-naked, working barefooted in the mud which discoloured their bodies and faces and their working rags. I was more than saddened, more than angry. I felt endangered. My mood must have communicated itself to Cecil’s father, for at that moment he said, ‘My people.’

  I wonder why those calm words had such an effect on me. I hated the speaker. For the first time he had disappointed me. I had thought of him as ascetic and fair and pious. I thought that these qualities, which I admired, had come to him with that money and success to which I was so devoted; and for a long time, even after this incident, I attributed these qualities to people who had made their money the hard way. I admired his lack of show, his separation of his business life from his home life. I noted his quiet, sincere taste. In his back veranda, where other people would have had things like thermometers from the tyre companies and calendars from various firms, he had religious pictures and photographs of Indian film actors. He was not interested in the cinema and photographs of Hollywood stars in a private house would have struck him as hopelessly vulgar. But the Indian actors in his back veranda were on a level with the religious pictures: together they were an act of piety towards his past, a reverencing of the land of his ancestors. Details like this had gone towards the making of my picture of him.

  And now I was disappointed. I imagine I had expected more passion and more pain. But I kept my thoughts to myself and merely said, ‘Why can’t they give them leggings?’ ‘They’ were the Stockwell estates, whose overseers’ houses, tall concrete pillars, cream concrete walls, red corrugated-iron roofs, presently appeared, rather close together, with no gardens to speak of and as bare of trees as the sugarcane fields in which they were set. Miserable crop! But the pain I felt was my own. Cecil’s father said, ‘Leggings cost money.’

  The fields fell behind. The road ran between shops and two-storeyed houses. Traffic was slower in the main road of the small town and we were driving behind a lorry loaded with floursacks covered by a wet tarpaulin. On this tarpaulin lay two Indian loaders, soaked through. They studied us. Cecil’s father had the ability of his age to ignore such scrutiny. I returned the scrutiny; it was the scrutiny of compassion still. There was nothing of compassion in the restless gaze of our driver; he was merely impatient to overtake and get on. His chance, as he thought, came. But he had miscalculated the speed of the oncoming car, and he had to cut in in front of the lorry, which braked with a squeal. He was a new driver, glad of the job and anxious to keep it; the silence in our car deepened into strain. At the next slowing-up our driver was too cautious. The lorry overtook us and instantly cut in. The loaders were no longer lying down. They were sitting up. They began to abuse us. I have always hated obscenity; it was doubly hateful to have to listen to it with Cecil’s father. We turned up the windows. The loaders turned to obscene gestures and the gestures of threat. They indicated that they had our number and would hunt us down and shoot us and cutlass us. For minutes this went on.

  At last we cleared the town and on the open road the lorry pulled away. Our driver made no attempt to keep up. When the lorry was out of sight Cecil’s father broke down. As he spoke he lost control of himself. He clenched and unclenched his fists, struck his palms and struck the back of the driver’s seat. The driver, out of sympathy and perhaps also because he feared assault, pulled up on the verge and, with his hands on the steering wheel, looked ahead past the clicking windscreen wipers.

  ‘Why you make me suffer like this?’ Cecil’s father asked the driver. ‘Why you make me suffer?’

  ‘I got his number, boss.’

  ‘You got his number, you got his number. What good that will do? You put me in the position of listening to all that.’

  ‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, boss. They will find out about the loaders and fix them up.’

  ‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, telephone Mr Mitchell. Hello, Mr Mitchell, some damn illiterate people insult me for ten minutes on the road this morning, and my own driver was in the wrong.’ He went wild. He was Cecil’s father and subject to the same somewhat unbalanced rages.

  I tried to calm him down. ‘They were only loaders, Nana.’

  This excited him more than ever. He howled and slapped his forehead. ‘They make me shame. They make me shame. Oh, my God!’ And in the parked car, close with the windows up, he behaved as though he had just been told he had lost a fortune. The bottler of Coca-Cola, the Isabella millionaire, the nominated Member of the Council.

  At first, during that drive, I had felt endangered. Now I thought I saw how easy it was to destroy. A man was only what he saw of himself in others, and an intimation came to me of chieftainship in that island. This was my political awakening. This might be said to have been my first political lesson. A leader of my people? A biter of the hand that fed me? Or simply a Singh, avenging a personal shipwreck? Whatever the impulse, that lesson, so easily learned, so easily carried out when the time came, was an exceedingly simple and foolish one.

  2

  CECIL sometimes came home with me after school. I was always pleased when he did. I liked Cecil. He was the opposite of Hok but in his own way just as attractive. I liked his confidence and his wildness. I liked his lefthander’s gestures, that lift of the shoulder when he walked. He was impulsively generous; his father used to say, with greater truth than any of us then knew, that Cecil was born to give away. I liked to give Cecil things too. But I had little to give him. The only interesting thing our house had was paper, headed or plain, from the Education Department. My father brought home quantities; he
said that the stealing of paper was not really stealing. I used to give Cecil some of this paper. His delight puzzled me; I never knew what he used the paper for.

  We were going through my father’s desk one day, both Cecil and I looking for something I could give Cecil, when we came upon a worn little booklet with photographs of naked women, blurred or depilated in patches. Plump little bodies in foolish attitudes: the weak enticing the weak. I was astonished and as ashamed as when I heard the loaders’ obscenities in Cecil’s father’s car. I told Cecil that the photographs were mine, partly to ease the shame and partly to suggest to him that I had resources of vice he had not suspected. I said he could have them. I had ‘used’ them – I don’t know how the word came to me – and I no longer needed them. He was greatly excited, so excited that he forgot to carry out the threat of nailing a Coca-Cola cap to my father’s desk.

  He took the booklet to school next day. It created a sensation. It caught the attention of the teachers as well and was passed among them from hand to hand until it rested on the headmaster’s desk. Cecil said the book was mine and when I was asked I said this was so. I was not flogged. Instead I was regarded with awe, especially after I had repeated the sentence about not needing the pictures since I had ‘used’ them. A letter was written to my father, which I delivered. He came to the school and we had a confrontation in the headmaster’s room below the neat time-table that was never followed and the board that contained the names of brilliant past scholars. The booklet lay isolated on the headmaster’s desk like a thing that could not be of interest to any of the three of us. The headmaster looked from my father to me. My father did not look at me and I did not look at him. I wished all the time to transmit to him the message that I did not think less of him for being interested in these pictures: he after all had a ‘wife’ and was only yielding to a widespread weakness. My father suffered. He was an honest man. The headmaster pressed him but he could not bring himself to condemn me. ‘I will talk to him. I will talk to him,’ he kept on saying.