A Way in the World Read Online Free

tide-marked, was still beautiful, and the idea of the fountain was somehow still there.
    On either side of the empty fountain big, free-standing, wooden notice-boards, head-high, were set in front of the open doors of government departments. These notice-boards also served as screens, shielding clerks and typists and other civil servants from the gaze of the people passing to and fro. At the back of the notice-boards were bicycle-racks, where the civil servants chained up their bicycles. Notice-boards and bicycle-racks took away something of the openness of the walkway below the high pierced dome. So already there was a feeling of a fine building not being seen in all its beauty, and beginning to be misused.
    The notice-boards didn’t carry government instructions. The pinned-up posters were about health care and the importance of vaccinations, things like that. Many of them came from London, and didn’t always completely apply to local conditions; but we were used to that. These notice-boards and posters were the work of the Information Office, a department that had been established during the war—in a timber building set down on the lawn of the Red House—togive out pictures and booklets about the war and about life in England. These posters and notices about health and blood-tests and X-rays and clean water were a peacetime continuation of that work. You saw these posters only in the Red House; you didn’t see them anywhere else. I never thought they meant anything; but they introduced me to the idea of government as a benevolent agency, concerned about people.
    This idea of government shouldn’t have been new to me, after all that I had learned at school. But in every practical and concrete way it was new. It must have been that I carried in my blood and brain very old Indian ideas about the indifference or the arbitrariness of rulers and governments. They were simply there; you looked to them for nothing. Or it might have been that—without any words being spoken—I had grown up thinking of cruelty as something always in the background. There was an ancient, or not-so-ancient, cruelty in the language of the streets: casual threats, man to man and parents to children, of punishments and degradation that took you back to plantation times. There was the cruelty of extended-family life; the cruelty of the elementary school, the bad beatings by teachers, the bloody end-of-term fights between boys; the cruelty of the Indian countryside and the African town. The simplest things around us held memories of cruelty.
    The Registrar-General’s Department was to the right of the fountain, if you entered the Red House from St. Vincent Street. If you walked right through you ended in Woodford Square. This was the most beautiful square in Port of Spain, and it was named after the very young English governor who in the second decade of the nineteenth century brought order and law to the colony after the anarchy that followed the British conquest. The Spaniards lost Port of Spain almost as soon as they had laid it out. Woodford Square, at that time, would have been nothing, empty ground. It had been embellished by the British, and we thought it of a piece with thesplendour of the Red House. It had a bandstand, a fountain like the one in the Red House, benches, decorative iron rails, paved paths; and it was full now of old, shady trees.
    Always beautiful, always a glorious thing of the town, yet even when I had first seen it, that Sunday before the war when my father took me on a walk through the town centre, this square was one of the places in Port of Spain where homeless people lived. Most of these people were Indians. Many of them would have been indentured immigrants from India who had served out their indentures on the sugar estates and then for one reason or another—perhaps they had become drinkers; perhaps they hadn’t been given their promised passage back to India; perhaps they had quarrelled with their families—had