Nothing Was Made In Trinidad.

I Really Wasn't Equipped To Be A Writer When I Left Oxford. But Then I Set Out To Learn. I've Always Had The Highest Regard For The Craft. I've Always Felt It Was Work.

Out Of Its Squalor And Human Decay, Its Eruptions Of Butchery, India Produced So Many People Of Grace And Beauty, Ruled By Elaborate Courtesy. Producing Too Much Life, It Denied The Value Of Life; Yet It Permitted A Unique Human Development To So Many. Nowhere Were People So Heightened, Rounded And Individualistic; Nowhere Did They Offer Themselves So Fully And With Such Assurance. To Know Indians Was To Take A Delight In People As People; Every Encounter Was An Adventure. I Did Not Want India To Sink [out Of My Memory]; The Mere Thought Was Painful.

I Think When You See So Many Hindu Temples Of The 10th Century Or Earlier Disfigured, Defaced, You Realise That Something Terrible Happened. I Feel The Civilisation Of That Closed World Was Mortally Wounded By Those Invasions The Old World Is Destroyed. That Has To Be Understood. Ancient Hindu India Was Destroyed.

Argentine Political Life Is Like The Life Of An Ant Community Or An African Forest Tribe: Full Of Events, Full Of Crisis And Deaths, But Life Is Always Cyclical, And The Year Ends As It Begins.

We Made No Inquiries About India Or About The Families People Had Left Behind. When Our Ways Of Thinking Had Changed, And We Wished To Know, It Was Too Late. I Know Nothing Of The People On My Father's Side; I Know Only That Some Of Them Came From Nepal