A Way in the World Read Online Free Page A

found themselves with nowhere to live. These people were without money, job, without anything like a family, without the English language; without any kind of representation. They were utterly destitute. They were people who had been, as in a fairy story, lifted up from the peasantry of India and set down thousands of miles away—weeks and weeks of sailing—in Trinidad. In the colonial setting of Trinidad, where rights were limited, you could have done anything with these people; and they were tormented by the people of the town.
    We all lived easily with this kind of cruelty. We saw it, but we seldom thought about it. Eventually these people from India died out; by the late 1940s they would nearly all have died. In the early 1940s my father talked to some of them and wrote an article about them for a local Indian magazine. When I went to work in the Red House they were no longer there in Woodford Square. What I remember were the black madmen, two or three of them, one of them with tangled long plaits or tails of stiff hair, grey-brown with dirt and dust and oil, and wearing a Robinson Crusoe-like set of clothes, an accumulation or improvisation not of skins but of rags that had all lost their original colour and turned black andgreasy. Perhaps he was harmless; but he had the madman’s assurance, and people walking through the square kept away from where he was, and tried to avoid his bright, inward-seeing eyes.
    This was where I went to work every day, in the Registrar-General’s Department, between St. Vincent Street and Woodford Square.
    MY JOB as an acting second-class clerk was to make copies of birth, marriage and death certificates. People who needed these certificates came to the Red House and made an arrangement with one of the freelance searchers who hung about the entrance to the department, near the notice-boards, waiting for customers. These searchers, after they had been given possible dates by their customers, then used stamped forms to requisition various volumes of certificates; the department’s messengers brought out the thick, heavy bound volumes, more wide than high, from the vaults; the searchers sat in the outer office on a polished long brown desk and searched through the volumes. In this room—with a view through the tall windows of the lawns of the Red House and the trees and iron rails of Woodford Square—there was an unexpected atmosphere of the classroom, with grown and sometimes elderly black men sitting side by side at the long desk, sometimes for a whole morning, as if under an enchantment laid on them at school, and turning the very wide pages of very big books, one page at a time. In a separate area of the outer office lawyers’ clerks looked for deeds. These men sat at single desks and some of them wore ties. They were altogether a higher class than the birth-and-death certificate-searchers, who really were in business—making a small, insecure living—because they could read and write, and many of the people who wanted certificates couldn’t.
    When a searcher found what he was looking for, he madea request for a copy; and a messenger brought the request and the appropriate volume to my table. A table, rather than a desk: I was only an acting second-class clerk, a stop-gap, and I sat at a narrow table near the vault, and did my work facing the green-distempered wall. The messengers passed behind me all the time on their way to and from the vault. The volumes I had to copy from were placed in a pile on my right; when I was finished with them I put them in a pile on my left. The piles were high: each volume was three or four inches thick, and about fifteen inches wide.
    The volumes smelled of fish glue. This was what they were bound with; and I suppose the glue was made from a boiling down of fish bones and skin and offal. It was the colour of honey; it dried very hard, and every careless golden drip had the clarity of glass; but it never lost the smell of fish and rottenness.
    I had