Fatherhood Quote by V. S. Naipaul

Silence becomes a kind of inheritance here, passed down as efficiently as a surname. Naipaul frames his family history as a record of deliberate non-knowing: not the romantic fog of the past, but an almost bureaucratic refusal to ask. The opening line is blunt enough to sound like policy. No inquiries. No backstory. In a diasporic household, that abstention isn’t neutral; it’s strategy. You don’t probe the old country because probing might pull you backward, or expose the fragility of your new footing.

The pivot matters: “When our ways of thinking had changed.” Assimilation, education, distance, whatever name you give it, arrives late and rearranges your priorities. Curiosity is presented as a modern sensibility, something you earn after you’ve escaped survival mode. And then Naipaul hits the quiet cruelty of time: “it was too late.” The cost of becoming is amnesia.

There’s a second edge under the family anecdote: colonial displacement as a machine that doesn’t just move labor, it scrambles lineage. India is not described, not even remembered; it’s a blank left by necessity and by shame. The final detail - “some of them came from Nepal” - lands like a stub of a record in an archive: the thinnest proof that there was once a fuller story. Naipaul’s intent isn’t to sentimentalize roots; it’s to show how easily roots are severed, and how belated identity can feel when it’s built from missing names.