Fate needs accomplices

Fate needs accomplices describes how destiny can take shape through ordinary acts whose importance is invisible at the time. The expression grows from Prabaker’s suggestion that the narrator use the name Lin: a casual choice that, in retrospect, helps form the identity under which he becomes known and understands himself.

Meaning and Image

The expression gives fate a practical, almost collaborative force. Destiny does not act alone; it depends on people who, often without realizing it, supply the small actions that allow a larger course of events to unfold. The accompanying image of destiny’s walls, their stones held together by minor and heedless complicities, makes the idea material: a life’s apparent design is assembled from choices that may seem incidental when they are made.

The Naming of Lin

After Prabaker suggests the shorter name, the narrator accepts it. He has assumed a dozen other names since escaping, and has become fatalistic about names imposed by circumstance or given by other people. Lin feels different: although the narrator could not have invented the diminutive himself, it sounds as though it belongs to him. He hears in it an echo of something ordained, and connects it both to his lost secret birth name and to the name under which he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Prabaker’s naming is therefore not simply a convenient change of address. At the moment of acceptance, the narrator cannot know that thousands of people will come to know him by that name, across places from Colaba to Kandahar and Kinshasa to Berlin. Prabaker also tells him that Lin has a fine and lucky meaning, recalling that his own name means Son of Light in Hindi; the exchange places a hopeful gloss beside the narrator’s more complicated sense of fate.

Retrospective Significance

The narrator identifies the naming as pivotal only in hindsight. What seemed to require no more than an arbitrary, almost superstitious yes or no becomes one of the small complicities through which his later life takes shape. Under the name Linbaba, he plays a role and becomes a character he judges more real and more true to his nature than any identity he had previously inhabited. The expression thus joins contingency to self-creation: Prabaker’s unplanned suggestion does not merely label the narrator but helps make possible the person he becomes.