Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul

On this floor the BBC had set aside a room for people like me, “freelances”—to me then not a word suggesting freedom and valour, but suggesting only people on the fringe of a mighty enterprise,a depressed and suppliant class: I would have given a lot to be “staff.”
    The freelances’ room didn’t encourage thoughts of radio glory; it was strictly for the production of little scripts. Something of the hotel atmosphere remained: in the great Victorian-Edwardian days of the Langham Hotel (it was mentioned in at least one Sherlock Holmes story), the freelances’ room might have been a pantry. It was at the back of the heavy brick building, and gloomy when the ceiling lights were turned off. It wasn’t cheerful when the lights were on: ochre walls with a peagreen dado, the gloss paint tarnished; a radiator below the window, with grit on the sill; two or three chairs, a telephone, two tables and two old standard typewriters.
    It was in that Victorian-Edwardian gloom, and at one of those typewriters, that late one afternoon, without having any idea where I was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page, I wrote:
Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, “What happening there, Bogart?”
    That was a Port of Spain memory. It seemed to come from far back, but it was only eleven or twelve years old. It came from the time when we—various branches of my mother’s family—were living in Port of Spain, in a house that belonged to my mother’s mother. We were country people, Indians, culturally still Hindus; and this move to Port of Spain was in the nature of a migration: from the Hindu and Indian countryside to the white-negro-mulatto town.
    Hat was our neighbor on the street. He wasn’t negro or mulatto. But we thought of him as half-way there. He was a Port of Spain Indian. The Port of Spain Indians—there were pockets of them—had no country roots, were individuals, hardly a community, and were separate from us for an additional reason: many of them were Madrassis, descendants of South Indians, not Hindi-speaking, and not people of caste. We didn’t see in them any of our own formalities or restrictions; and thoughwe lived raggedly ourselves (and were far too numerous for the house), we thought of the other Indians in the street only as street people.
    That shout of “Bogart!” was in more than one way a shout from the street. And, to add to the incongruity, it was addressed to someone in our yard: a young man, very quiet, yet another person connected in some way with my mother’s family. He had come not long before from the country and was living in the separate one-room building at the back of our yard.
    We called this room the “servant room.” Port of Spain houses, up to the 1930s, were built with these separate servant rooms—verandah-less little boxes, probably descended in style from the ancillary “negro-houses” of slave times. I suppose that in one or two houses in our street servants of the house actually lived in the servant room. But generally it wasn’t so. Servant rooms, because of the privacy they offered, were in demand, and not by servants.
    It was wartime. The migration of my own family into the town had become part of a more general movement. People of all conditions were coming into Port of Spain to work at the two American bases. One of those bases had been built on recently reclaimed land just at the end of our street—eight houses down. Twice a day we heard the bugles; Americans, formal in their uniforms, with their khaki ties tucked into their shirts, were another part of the life of our street. The street was busy; the yards were crowded. Our yard was more crowded than most. No servant ever lodged in our servant room. Instead, the room sheltered a succession of favoured transients, on their way to better things. Before the big family rush, some of these transients had been outsiders; but now they were