Class v caste: Naipaul's In a Free State

The selection One among Many (?) from V.S. Naipaul's aptly titled In a Free State (in the Everyman edition Collected Short Fiction) is a stranger-in-a-strange-land motif: Indian lower-caste servant travels to Washington, D.C., where he will live for a time as the servant/cook for his boss, a high-level bureaucrat or businessman of an upper caste: in the first part of this section, the servant timidly begins to roam around D.C. and explore its wonders, and Naipaul is very good at providing the world from his very limited point of view: he gets confused in the hallway of his apartment building and ends up going to sleep in the hallway on the carpet, which reminds him of sleeping on the sidewalk back in India; he walks the city and is very surprised to see a group chanting Indian prayers with horrible accents - the Hare Krishnas in what I think must e Dupont Circle. He's particularly interested in and curious about the blacks whom he sees in D.C. - he understands that they are the victims of the same kind of caste system he experienced in India, but he doesn't quite get their culture and behavior. Improbably, he has a brief sexual liaison with a black maid working in his building; then, later, he roams the city streets during the riots after MLK assassination - that's about where I left it last night. There's much potential here: as noted yesterday, this is the emerging Naipaul theme of cultural crossovers and the prejudice against and underestimation of a repressed (and in this case uneducated) minority, and the opportunity to use the class system of the U.S. as a commentary on the caste system of India, or v.v., is very tempting - but this promise will be fulfilled only if Naipaul can maintain sympathy for his narrator, and not make him an object of ridicule or contempt.