Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul Page A

tribe have been carrying out child-sacrifice in a certain cave. It is part of your tribal ways. Now that you have all prospered and become townsmen you are ashamed and frightened. So you have come and confessed to me and asked for my understanding. I have given you that, because I understand your tribal ways, but I cannot say I am not horrified, and if I choose I can lead anyone to the cave with the bones of many children. Now get out. Your hair is oiled, but your very shadow pollutes this sacred place.” The headman cringes and backs away. He says, “Forgive, forgive.” The brahmin says, “And don't forget your pledge.”
    The time comes for the brahmin's annual sacrifice. He makes his way at night to the cave of bones. He turns over and polishes every kind of story in case the tribal chief has informed on him and people are waiting for him. No one is waiting. He is not surprised. In the dark cave there are two drugged children. The headman has, after all, behaved well. With a practised hand the brahmin sacrifices the two to the spirit of the cave. When he comes to burn the little corpses he sees by the light of his wood torch that they are his own children.
    This was where the story ended. Willie's father had read without skipping. And when, mechanically, he turned back to the beginning he saw—what he had forgotten during the reading—that the story was called “A Life of Sacrifice.”
    He thought, “His mind is diseased. He hates me and he hates his mother, and now he's turned against himself. This is what the missionaries have done to him with Mom and Pop and Dick Tracy and the Justice Society of America comic magazine, and Christ on the Cross movies in Passion Week, and Bogart and Cagney and George Raft the rest of the time. I cannot deal rationally with this kind of hatred. I will deal with it in the way of the mahatma. I will ignore it. I will keep a vow of silence so far as he is concerned.”
    Two or three weeks later the boy's mother came to him and said, “I wish you would break that vow of silence. It is making Willie very unhappy.”
    “The boy is lost. There is nothing I can do for him.” She said, “You have to help him. No one else can. Two days ago I found him sitting in the dark. When I put the light on I saw he was crying. I asked him why. He said, ‘I just feel that everything in the world is so sad. And it is all that we have. I don't know what to do.' I didn't know what to say to him. It's something he gets from your side. I tried to comfort him. I told him that everything would be all right, and he would go to Canada. He said he didn't want to go to Canada. He didn't want to be a missionary. He didn't even want to go back to the school.”
    “Something must have happened at the school.”
    “I asked him. He said he went to the principal's office for something. There was a magazine on the table. It was a missionary magazine. There was a colour picture on the cover. A priest with glasses and a wristwatch was standing with one foot on a statue of the Buddha. He had just chopped it down with an axe, and he was smiling and leaning on the axe like a lumberjack. I used to see magazines and pictures like that when I was at the school. It didn't worry me. But when Willie saw the picture he felt ashamed for himself. He felt the fathers had been fooling him all these years. He was ashamed that he ever wanted to be a missionary. All he really wanted was to go to Canada and get away from here. Until he saw that picture he didn't know what missionary work was.”
    “If he doesn't want to go to the mission school he doesn't have to go.”
    “Like father, like son.”
    “The mission school was your idea.”
    So Willie Chandran stopped going to the mission school. He began to idle at home.
    His father saw him one day asleep face down, a closed copy of a school edition of The Vicar of Wakefield beside him, his feet crossed, the red soles much lighter than the rest of him. There was such unhappiness and