Literary Occasions Read Online Free

aspects of the fairytale, became a little like things by Andersen, far off and dateless, easy to play with mentally.
    But when I went to the books themselves I found it hard to go beyond what had been read to me. What I already knew was magical; what I tried to read on my own was very far away. The language was too hard; I lost my way in social or historical detail. In the Conrad story the climate and vegetation was like what lay around me, but the Malays seemed extravagant, unreal, and I couldn’t place them. When it came to the modern writers their stress on their own personalities shut me out: I couldn’t pretend to be Maugham in London or Huxley or Ackerley in India.
    I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.
2
    WE WERE an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World. To me India seemed very far away, mythical, but we were at that time, in all the branches ofour extended family, only about forty or fifty years out of India. We were still full of the instincts of people of the Gangetic plain, though year by year the colonial life around us was drawing us in. My own presence in Mr. Worm’s class was part of that change. No one so young from our family had been to that school. Others were to follow me to the exhibition class, but I was the first.
    Mangled bits of old India (very old, the India of the nineteenth-century villages, which would have been like the India of earlier centuries) were still with me, not only in the enclosed life of our extended family, but also in what came to us sometimes from our community outside.
    One of the first big public things I was taken to was the
Ramlila,
the pageant-play based on the
Ramayana,
the epic about the banishment and later triumph of Rama, the Hindu hero-divinity. It was done in an open field in the middle of sugar-cane, on the edge of our small country town. The male performers were barebacked and some carried long bows; they walked in a slow, stylised, rhythmic way, on their toes, and with high, quivering steps; when they made an exit (I am going now by very old memory) they walked down a ramp that had been dug in the earth. The pageant ended with the burning of the big black effigy of the demon king of Lanka. This burning was one of the things people had come for; and the effigy, roughly made, with tar paper on a bamboo frame, had been standing in the open field all the time, as a promise of the conflagration.
    Everything in that
Ramlila
had been transported from India in the memories of people. And though as theatre it was crude, and there was much that I would have missed in the story, I believe I understood more and felt more than I had done during
The Prince and the Pauper
and
Sixty Glorious Years
at the local cinema. Those were the very first films I had seen, and I had never had an idea what I was watching. Whereas the
Ramlila
had given reality, and a lot of excitement, to what I had known of the
Ramayana.
    The
Ramayana
was the essential Hindu story. It was the more approachable of our two epics, and it lived among us the way epics lived. It had a strong and fast and rich narrative and, even with the divine machinery, the matter was very human. The characters and their motives could always be discussed; the epic was like a moral education for us all. Everyone around me would have known the story at least in outline; some people knew some of the actual verses. I didn’t have to be taught it: the story of Rama’s unjust banishment to the dangerous forest was like something I had always known.
    It lay below the writing I was to get to know later in the city, the Andersen and Aesop I was to read on my own, and the things my father was to read to me.
3
    THE ISLAND was small, 1800 square miles, half a million people, but the population was very mixed and there were many separate worlds.
    When my father got a job