Another Indian, Mahesh, tries willfully to make family life into a bulwark against the assaults of history. A Belgian priest keeps collecting tribal masks, though the masks are visibly decaying, like the world from which they came. A powerful woman from the bush comes to trade and begs Salim to look after her son, Ferdinand, now a student in town and starting to parrot the slogans of national pride. Most spectacular of all is Raymond, a white intellectual who dresses up the Big Man's speeches with Parisian rhetoric. This act of piety is something that brings tears to the eyes.
Parody is followed by pathos.
Raymond is soon dumped by the Big Man, to become another used-up intellectual whose phrases are no longer handy. There's no right. Inexorably he is pushed into a kind of despair, saddened by a growing persuasion that, at least in the Big Man's country, human effort must burn itself out into waste, while ideas and ideals shrink to mere covers for power. Civilized norms are all we have to defend ourselves against ourselves, and they form, at best, a thin shield. He wanted both my respect and my tolerance, even my compassion.