In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul Page A

bigger causes that steadily weakened me. I became more and more detached from the men in the kitchen. When they spoke of their green cards and the jobs they were about to get I felt like asking them: Why? Why?
    And every day the mirror told its own tale. Without exercise, with the sickening of my heart and my mind, I was losing my looks. My face had become pudgy and sallow and full of spots; it was becoming ugly. I could have cried for that, discovering mygood looks only to lose them. It was like a punishment for my presumption, the punishment I had feared when I bought the green suit.
    Priya said, ‘Santosh, you must get some exercise. You are not looking well. Your eyes are getting like mine. What are you pining for? Are you pining for Bombay or your family in the hills?’
    But now, even in my mind, I was a stranger in those places.
    Priya said one Sunday morning, ‘Santosh, I am going to take you to see a Hindi movie today. All the Indians of Washington will be there, domestics and everybody else.’
    I was very frightened. I didn’t want to go and I couldn’t tell him why. He insisted. My heart began to beat fast as soon as I got into the car. Soon there were no more houses with gas-lamps in the entrance, just those long wide burnt-out
hubshi
streets, now with fresh leaves on the trees, heaps of rubble on bulldozed, fenced-in lots, boarded-up shop windows, and old smoke-stained signboards announcing what was no longer true. Cars raced along the wide roads; there was life only on the roads. I thought I would vomit with fear.
    I said, ‘Take me back,
sahib
.’
    I had used the wrong word. Once I had used the word a hundred times a day. But then I had considered myself a small part of my employer’s presence, and the word was not servile; it was more like a name, like a reassuring sound, part of my employer’s dignity and therefore part of mine. But Priya’s dignity could never be mine; that was not our relationship. Priya I had always called Priya; it was his wish, the American way, man to man. With Priya the word was servile. And he responded to the word. He did as I asked; he drove me back to the restaurant. I never called him by his name again.
    I was good-looking; I had lost my looks. I was a free man; I had lost my freedom.
    *
    One of the Mexican waiters came into the kitchen late one evening and said, ‘There is a man outside who wants to see the chef.’
    No one had made this request before, and Priya was at once agitated. ‘Is he an American? Some enemy has sent him here. Sanitary-anitary, health-ealth, they can inspect my kitchens at any time.’
    ‘He is an Indian,’ the Mexican said.
    I was alarmed. I thought it was my old employer; that quiet approach was like him. Priya thought it was a rival. Though Priya regularly ate in the restaurants of his rivals he thought it unfair when they came to eat in his. We both went to the door and peeked through the glass window into the dimly lit dining-room.
    ‘Do you know that person, Santosh?’
    ‘Yes, sahib.’
    It wasn’t my old employer. It was one of his Bombay friends, a big man in Government, whom I had often served in the chambers. He was by himself and seemed to have just arrived in Washington. He had a new Bombay haircut, very close, and a stiff dark suit, Bombay tailoring. His shirt looked blue, but in the dim multi-coloured light of the dining-room everything white looked blue. He didn’t look unhappy with what he had eaten. Both his elbows were on the curry-spotted tablecloth and he was picking his teeth, half closing his eyes and hiding his mouth with his cupped left hand.
    ‘I don’t like him,’ Priya said. ‘Still, big man in Government and so on. You must go to him, Santosh.’
    But I couldn’t go.
    ‘Put on your apron, Santosh. And that chef’s cap. Prestige. You must go, Santosh.’
    Priya went out to the dining-room and I heard him say in English that I was coming.
    I ran up to my room, put some oil on my hair, combed my hair, put