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

on my best pants and shirt and my shining shoes. It wasso, as a man about town rather than as a cook, I went to the dining-room.
    The man from Bombay was as astonished as Priya. We exchanged the old courtesies, and I waited. But, to my relief, there seemed little more to say. No difficult questions were put to me; I was grateful to the man from Bombay for his tact. I avoided talk as much as possible. I smiled. The man from Bombay smiled back. Priya smiled uneasily at both of us. So for a while we were, smiling in the dim blue-red light and waiting.
    The man from Bombay said to Priya, ‘Brother, I just have a few words to say to my old friend Santosh.’
    Priya didn’t like it, but he left us.
    I waited for those words. But they were not the words I feared. The man from Bombay didn’t speak of my old employer. We continued to exchange courtesies. Yes, I was well and he was well and everybody else we knew was well; and I was doing well and he was doing well. That was all. Then, secretively, the man from Bombay gave me a dollar. A dollar, ten rupees, an enormous tip for Bombay. But, from him, much more than a tip: an act of graciousness, part of the sweetness of the old days. Once it would have meant so much to me. Now it meant so little. I was saddened and embarrassed. And I had been anticipating hostility!
    Priya was waiting behind the kitchen door. His little face was tight and serious, and I knew he had seen the money pass. Now, quickly, he read my own face, and without saying anything to me he hurried out into the dining-room.
    I heard him say in English to the man from Bombay, ‘Santosh is a good fellow. He’s got his own room with bath and everything. I am giving him a hundred dollars a week from next week. A thousand rupees a week. This is a first-class establishment.’
    A thousand chips a week! I was staggered. It was much more than any man in Government got, and I was sure the man from Bombay was also staggered, and perhaps regretting his good gesture and that precious dollar of foreign exchange.
    ‘Santosh,’ Priya said, when the restaurant closed that evening, ‘that man was an enemy. I knew it from the moment I saw him. And because he was an enemy I did something very bad, Santosh.’
    ‘Sahib.’
    ‘I lied, Santosh. To protect you. I told him, Santosh, that I was going to give you seventy-five dollars a week after Christmas.’
    ‘Sahib.’
    ‘And now I have to make that lie true. But, Santosh, you know that is money we can’t afford. I don’t have to tell you about overheads and things like that. Santosh, I will give you sixty.’
    I said, ‘Sahib, I couldn’t stay on for less than a hundred and twenty-five.’
    Priya’s eyes went shiny and the hollows below his eyes darkened. He giggled and pressed out his lips. At the end of that week I got a hundred dollars. And Priya, good man that he was, bore me no grudge.
    *
    Now here was a victory. It was only after it happened that I realized how badly I had needed such a victory, how far, gaining my freedom, I had begun to accept death not as the end but as the goal. I revived. Or rather, my senses revived. But in this city what was there to feed my senses? There were no walks to be taken, no idle conversations with understanding friends. I could buy new clothes. But then? Would I just look at myself in the mirror? Would I go walking, inviting passers-by to look at me and my clothes? No, the whole business of clothes and dressing up only threw me back into myself.
    There was a Swiss or German woman in the cake-shop some doors away, and there was a Filipino woman in the kitchen. They were neither of them attractive, to tell the truth. The Swiss or German could have broken my back with a slap, and the Filipino, though young, was remarkably like one of our older hill women. Still, I felt I owed something to the senses, and I thought Imight frolic with these women. But then I was frightened of the responsibility. Goodness, I had learned that a woman is not