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had gone away.
    Intimations: people had lived with this emotion as with something private, not to be carelessly exposed. Everyone—the typist in the office, the black boy or man from St. James, Blair, even the master of ceremonies at the Miss Fine Brown Frame contest, the mocking crowd there, and some of the self-mocking contestants—everyone had lived with it according to his character and intellectual means. Everyone you saw on the street had a bit of this emotion locked up in himself. It was no secret. It was part of the unacknowledged cruelty of our setting, the thing we didn’t want to go searching into. Now all those private emotions ran together into a common pool, where everyone found a blessing. Everyone, high and low, could now exchange his private emotion, which he sometimes distrusted, for the sacrament of the larger truth.
    In the square, romantic with its lights and shadows, they talked of history and the new constitution and rights; but what had been generated was more like religion. It wasn’tsomething that could be left behind in the square; it couldn’t be separated from the other sides of life. And I understood the exaltation, and distance, I had sensed in people when I had visited my old office in the Red House.
    In the outer office of the Registrar-General’s Department I had remembered the lawyer’s clerks sitting like students at their sloping desks and searching for deeds in large bound volumes. They were modest but self-respecting people; some wore ties and white shirts. They had a kind of ambition, like everybody else. Sometimes they pretended to be more ambitious than they were, but many of them knew they weren’t going far, and they were reconciled to it, as you could see when sometimes an older man—of a generation without possibilities, a generation now more or less finished—came to do some searching, and led them all into a kind of pointless barber-shop chatter, like servant-room gossip, full of knowingness and conspiratorial hints, but really quite empty, mere words.
    (I had got to know about this barber-shop gossip even before I went to work at the Red House. After I had applied for my little temporary clerkship, word was sent back to me, through a cousin, from someone said to be in the know, someone deep in the machinery of the Red House: “Pereira is the man he have to see. All those papers pass through Pereira hand.” Pereira was a clerk in some department. One midday a man cycling down the Western Main Road was pointed out to me: “Look. Pereira.” The great man, just like that, in the Western Main Road, with everybody else! He was a mixed man, more Indian-looking than Portuguese, not old, and I suppose he was cycling home from the Red House for lunch. He had no hat and, in all the hot sun, he was taking his time, sitting upright on the saddle of his heavy, pre-war English bicycle, pen and pencil clipped to the pocket of his shirt, and with his socks pulled up over his trouser bottoms, which were neatly folded back over his shins. In anothermemory of this sighting, Pereira was on a slender-framed racing cycle, crouched over the dropped handlebars, sitting high on the narrow, ridged saddle, and pedalling away. The second memory is probably satirical and mischievous. I don’t know. I never saw Pereira again; I don’t even know whether the man pointed out to me was Pereira. I got the job because my former school principal recommended me for it, and no one talked to me about Pereira again.)
    Some of those search clerks in the Registrar-General’s Department were still there. They were easy with me; they were ready to chat. But there wasn’t the barber-shop slackness about them. I thought I detected a new intensity, a new stiffening; and I felt that that intensity—hidden, unacknowledged—had always been there, and even in the older man.
    I felt this even when I met simpler people. Like the paunchy department messenger, pleased to make the same joke he had made six years