The Daily

Happy Day, V.S. Naipaul!

I can give you that historical birds eye view. But I cannot readily explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents and grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor or Leonard Side’s came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all of the traits we inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

            A Way In The World, V.S. Naipaul