ANNALES BAC S/ES épreuve de compréhension Willie is the son of a Brahman1 and a lower-caste woman. He loved his mother, and when he was very young he used such money as came his way to buy pretty things for her and the house: a bamboo-framed mirror, a bamboo wall-stand for a vase, a nice length of blockstamped cloth, a brass vase, a painted papier-mâché box from Kashmir, crêpe-paper flowers. But gradually as he grew up he understood more about the mission school and its position in the state. He understood more about the pupils in the school. He understood that to go to the mission school was to be branded, and he began to look at his mother from more and more of a distance. The more successful he became at school – and he was better than his fellows – the greater that distance grew. He began to long to go to Canada, where his teachers came from. He even began to think he might adopt their religion and become like them and travel the world teaching. And one day, when he was asked to write an English “composition” about his holidays he pretended he was a Canadian, with parents who were called “Mom” and “Pop”. Mom and Pop had one day decided to take the kids to the beach. They had gone upstairs early in the morning to the children’s room to wake them up, and the children had put on their new holiday clothes and they had driven off in the family car to the beach. The beach was full of holidaymakers, and the family had eaten the holiday sweets they had brought with them and at the end of the day, tanned and content, they had driven home. All the details of this foreign life – the upstairs house, the children’s room – had been taken from American comic books which had been circulating in the mission school. These details had been mixed up with local details, like the holiday clothes and the holiday sweets, some of which Mom and Pop had at one stage out of their own great content given to half-naked beggars. This composition was awarded full marks, ten out of ten, and