New York City. The nineteen-nineties. One fall afternoon, a black writer renowned for his examination of colonialism leaves a restaurant in lower Manhattan in the company of two friends, one white, one black. The man is in a hurry to get uptown, where his family is waiting for him. He tries to flag down a passing cab. It doesn’t stop. A second cab pulls up. The driver appears to be a dark-skinned Indian. He looks at the writer, and at the other black man, standing next to him; their white friend, behind them, is not visible from the taxi. As the man reaches for the door handle, the driver steps on the accelerator and speeds off. The man’s face goes slack with disbelief. His hand is still clutched around the missing door handle. He says, “But he looks like me!”

Arwacas, Trinidad. Early twentieth century. A black woman enters a general store owned by a family of Indian immigrants. The woman asks for “flesh-coloured stockings, which were then enjoying some vogue in rural Trinidad.” The shopkeeper’s daughter takes down a box and holds up “a pair of black cotton stockings,” writes V. S. Naipaul, the creator of this scene, which appears in his 1961 novel, “A House for Mr. Biswas.” “ ‘Eh!’ The woman’s gasp could be heard throughout the shop. ‘You playing with me? How the hell all-you get so fresh and conceited?' She began to curse. ‘Playing with me!’ She pulled boxes and bolts of cloth off the counter and hurled them to the floor and every time something crashed she shouted, ‘Playing with me!’ ”

Several decades and more than two thousand miles separate these moments—one real and one invented—and yet their content is similar; each involves an instance of discrimination between two people who are not white, and each reflects a truth about life on the color scale, about how the oppressed appropriate the behavior of the oppressor. “If you’re brown, stick around, if you’re black, get back, get back, get back,” went the old blues song. In order not to be “black,” you have to be something else, or at least prove that you’re climbing your way out of the heart of your own darkness to something better—a shop, a taxi. And you must lord it over the “ordinary” black who hasn’t earned the same exalted sense of himself. That ordinary black may be a man standing on a New York City street, or a woman shopping in pre-“Black Is Beautiful” Trinidad, for whom color is a ball of dirt thrown against the white wall of British standards of beauty.

The community of Indians that Naipaul depicts in “A House for Mr. Biswas”—the most fully realized of his thirteen books of fiction—is based on the circles he grew up in: poor Hindus who had immigrated to Trinidad from India in the late nineteenth century. Naipaul’s paternal grandfather came to the island in 1880, the child of more or less indentured servants who had been promised a better life by the British government if they abandoned North India for another British outpost. Trinidad, according to the British, needed building up—something the “bush niggers” whom Columbus had dropped off there two centuries earlier seemed not to have managed to do. Naipaul’s grandfather became a village pandit—a holy man and a man of learning—but he died young, and whatever prosperity the family had attained was soon lost. Naipaul’s great-uncle—his grandfather’s brother—had to work in the sugarcane fields for eight cents a day. His aunt was a servant. Her brother, Naipaul’s father, Seepersad, was spared, somewhat. Because he showed signs of following in his father’s footsteps, he was allowed to finish school, but he still had to work in a shop at night. He married a woman who was relatively well off—she was from a family of landowners—and although he had trouble supporting the family without her help, he managed to have a reasonably successful career as a local journalist.

In “An Area of Darkness” (1964), Naipaul’s account of his life in Trinidad and his first journey to India, he writes, “To our condition as Indians in a multi-racial society we gave no thought. Criticism from others there was, as I now realize, but it never penetrated the walls of our house, and I cannot as a child remember hearing any discussion about race.” He goes on, “I have been rebuked by writers from the West Indies, and notably George Lamming”—a Barbadian novelist and essayist—“for not paying sufficient attention in my books to non-Indian groups. The confrontation of different communities, [Lamming] said, was the fundamental West Indian experience. So indeed it is, and increasingly. But to see the attenuation of the culture of my childhood as the result of a dramatic confrontation of opposed worlds would be to distort the reality. To me the worlds were juxtaposed and mutually exclusive.”

Naipaul’s disclaimer is disingenuous; it is precisely those opposed worlds—the black and Indian communities living under colonial rule on the island Naipaul has called that “dot” in the world—that he shows so brilliantly in the shop scene in “Mr. Biswas.” And his assertion that his relatives never gave any thought to their race or to the race of those around them is hard to believe. It is well documented that the Asian immigrants of Naipaul’s grandparents’ generation suffered the disdain of black Trinidadians. Many of them then lived out the immigrant’s dream and ended up despising the natives they had risen above. Naipaul himself was indoctrinated in bigotry by his father. While he was studying on a scholarship at Oxford, in the early fifties, for instance, he received a letter from his father about two young female cousins who were boarding with the family. “I had never realised, until about three weeks ago, how shockingly ‘advanced’ these girls have become,” Seepersad wrote. He went on: