Potential and Prospects

To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given to me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty.

Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper, and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside men's control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century - estates of which this Wiltshire estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis.

Fifty years ago, there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now, my presence was a little unlikely. But more than an accident had brought me here. Or rather, in the series of accidents that had brought me to the manor cottage, with a view of the restored church, there was a clear historical line.


The migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad, had given me the English language as my own, and a particular kind of education. This had partly seeded my wish to be a writer in a particular mode, and had committed me to the literary career I had been following in England for 20 years.

From "The Enigma of Arrival"