A Bend in the River (23 page)

“When the secretary came back to the room, I noticed that he still walked on tiptoe, still cringed, still leaned forward. I saw then that what had looked like a cringe, that humping of the shoulders as he had jumped off his chair and loped across to the door, wasn’t something he had put on, but was natural. He was a hunchback. This was a shock. I began confusedly to think back to my earlier impressions of the man, and I was in a state of confusion when he motioned me through the door into the inner office, where a fat black man in a black suit, one of our black Indians, was sitting at a big black table, opening envelopes with a paper knife.

“His shiny cheeks were swollen with fat and his lips appeared
to pout. I sat down on a chair placed some distance away from his desk. He didn’t look up at me and he didn’t speak. And I didn’t speak; I let him open his letters. Not an hour’s exercise had he taken in his life, this devout man of the South. He reeked of caste and temple, and I was sure that below that black suit he wore all kinds of amulets.

“At last, but still not looking up, he said, ‘So?’

“I said, ‘I wrote in about joining the diplomatic service. I had a letter from Aggarwal and I came to see him.’

“Opening his letters, he said,
‘Mister
Aggarwal.’

“I was glad he had found something we might fight about.

“ ‘Aggarwal didn’t seem to know too much. He sent me to Verma.’

“He almost looked at me. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Mister Verma.’

“ ‘Verma didn’t know too much either. He spent a long time with someone called Divedi.’

“ ‘Mister Divedi.’

“I gave up. He could outplay me. I said, wearily, ‘And he sent me to you.’

“ ‘But you say in your letter you are from Africa. How can you join our diplomatic service? How can we have a man of divided loyalties?’

“I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?

“He said, ‘You people have been living the good life in Africa. Now that things have got a little rough you want to run back. But you must throw in your lot with the local people.’

“That was what he said. But I don’t have to tell you that what he was really talking about was his own virtue and good fortune. For himself the purity of caste, arranged marriage, the correct diet, the services of the untouchables. For everybody else, pollution. Everybody else was steeped in pollution, and had to pay the price. It was like the message of the photographs of Gandhi and Nehru in the room outside.

“He said, ‘If you become a citizen of India, there are the examinations. We have arranged for them to be taken at some of the universities here. Mr. Verma should have told you. He shouldn’t have sent you to me.’

“He pressed a buzzer on his desk. The door opened, and the hunchback secretary sent in a tall, thin man with bright, anxious eyes and a genuine cringe. The new man carried an artist’s zip-up portfolio, and he had a long green woollen scarf wound about his neck, although the weather was warm. Without reference to me, with eyes only for the black man, he unzipped his portfolio and began taking out drawings. He held them one by one against his chest, giving the black man an anxious open-mouthed smile every time, and then looking down at what he was showing, so that, with his head bowed over his drawings, and with the cringe that was already there, he looked like a man doing penance, displaying one sin after another. The black man didn’t look at the artist, only at the drawings. They were of temples and of smiling women picking tea—perhaps for some window display about the new India.

“I had been dismissed. The hunchback secretary, tense over his old, big typewriter, but not typing, his bony hands like crabs on the keys, gave me one last look of terror. This time, though, in his look I thought there was also a question: ‘Do you understand now about me?’

“Walking down the steps, surrounded by the motifs of imperial India, I saw Mr. Verma, away from his desk again, and with more papers; but he had forgotten me. The idle merchant-caste man in the office downstairs remembered me, of course. I received his mocking smile, and then I went out through the revolving door into the London air.

“My crash course in diplomacy had lasted a little over an hour. It was past twelve, too late for the comfort of coffee and cake, as a sign in a snack bar reminded me. I set to walking. I was full of rage. I followed the curve of Aldwych to the end, crossed the Strand, and went down to the river.

“As I walked, the thought came to me: It is time to go home. It wasn’t our town that I thought of, or our stretch of the African
coast. I saw a country road lined with tall shade trees. I saw fields, cattle, a village below trees. I don’t know what book or picture I had got that from, or why a place like that should have seemed to me safe. But that was the picture that came to me, and I played with it. The mornings, the dew, the fresh flowers, the shade of the trees in the middle of the day, the fires in the evening. I felt I had known that life, and that it was waiting for me again somewhere. It was fantasy, of course.

“I awakened to where I was. I was walking on the Embankment, beside the river, walking without seeing. On the Embankment wall there are green metal lamp standards. I had been examining the dolphins on the standards, dolphin by dolphin, standard by standard. I was far from where I had started, and I had momentarily left the dolphins to examine the metal supports of the pavement benches. These supports, as I saw with amazement, were in the shape of camels. Camels and their sacks! Strange city: the romance of India in that building, and the romance of the desert here. I stopped, stepped back mentally, as it were, and all at once saw the beauty in which I had been walking—the beauty of the river and the sky, the soft colours of the clouds, the beauty of light on water, the beauty of the buildings, the care with which it had all been arranged.

“In Africa, on the coast, I had paid attention only to one colour in nature—the colour of the sea. Everything else was just bush, green and living, or brown and dead. In England so far I had walked with my eyes at shop level; I had seen nothing. A town, even London, was just a series of streets or street names, and a street was a row of shops. Now I saw differently. And I understood that London wasn’t simply a place that was there, as people say of mountains, but that it had been made by men, that men had given attention to details as minute as those camels.

“I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—
London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make-believe. Home—what for? To hide? To bow to our great men? For people in our situation, people led into slavery, that is the biggest trap of all. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. ‘Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!’ No! I want to be a man myself.

“At certain times in some civilizations great leaders can bring out the manhood in the people they lead. It is different with slaves. Don’t blame the leaders. It is just part of the dreadfulness of the situation. It is better to withdraw from the whole business, if you can. And I could. You may say—and I know, Salim, that you have thought it—thai: I have turned my back on my community and sold out. I say: ‘Sold out to what and from what? What do you have to offer me? What is your own contribution? And can you give me back my manhood?’ Anyway, that was what I decided that morning, beside the river of London, between the dolphins and the camels, the work of some dead artists who had been adding to the beauty of their city.

“That was five years ago. I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn’t have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, and no one would have wanted me to do it. I would have said: ‘It’s all over for me, so why should I let myself be used by anybody? The Americans want to win the world. It’s their fight, not mine.’ And that would have been stupid. It is stupid to talk of
the
Americans. They are not a tribe, as you might think from the outside. They’re all individuals fighting to make their way, trying as hard as you or me not to sink.

“It wasn’t easy after I left the university. I still had to get a job, and the only thing I knew now was what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to exchange one prison for another. People like me have to make their own jobs. It isn’t something that’s going to come to you in a brown envelope. The job is there, waiting. But it doesn’t exist for you or anyone else until you discover it, and you discover it because it’s for you and you alone.

“I had done a little acting at the university—that had begun with a walk-on part in a little film somebody had made about a boy and girl walking in a park. I fell in with the remnants of that group in London and began to do a certain amount of acting. Not in any important way. London is full of little theatrical groups. They write their own plays, and they get grants from firms and local councils here and there. A lot of them live on the dole. Sometimes I played English parts, but usually they wrote parts for me, so that as an actor I found myself being the kind of person I didn’t want to be in real life. I played an Indian doctor visiting a dying working-class mother; I did another Indian doctor who had been charged with rape; I was a bus conductor no one wanted to work with. And so on. Once I did Romeo. Another time there was an idea of rewriting
The Merchant of Venice
as
The Malindi Banker,
so that I could play Shylock. But it became too complicated.

“It was a bohemian life, and it was attractive at first. Then it became depressing. People dropped out and took jobs and you understood that they had had pretty solid connections all along. That was always a letdown, and there were times during those two years when I felt lost and had to fight hard to hold on to that mood that had come to me beside the river. Among all those nice people I was the only real dropout. And I didn’t want to be a dropout at all. I’m not running these people down. They did what they could to make room for me, and that is more than any outsider can say for us. It’s a difference in civilization.

“I was taken one Sunday to lunch at the house of a friend of a friend. There was nothing bohemian about the house or the lunch, and I discovered that I had been invited for the sake of one of the other guests. He was an American and he was interested
in Africa. He spoke about Africa in an unusual way. He spoke of Africa as though Africa was a sick child and he was the parent. I later became very close to this man, but at that lunch he irritated me and I was rough with him. This was because I had never met that kind of person before. He had all this money to spend on Africa, and he desperately wanted to do the right thing. I suppose the idea of all that money going to waste made me unhappy. But he also had the simplest big-power ideas about the regeneration of Africa.

“I told him that Africa wasn’t going to be saved or won by promoting the poems of Yevtushenko or by telling the people about the wickedness of the Berlin Wall. He didn’t look too surprised. He wanted to hear more, and I realised I had been invited to the lunch to say the things I had been saying. And it was there that I began to understand that everything which I had thought had made me powerless in the world had also made me of value, and that to the American I was of interest precisely because I was what I was, a man without a side.

“That was how it began. That was how I became aware of all the organizations that were using the surplus wealth of the Western world to protect that world. The ideas I put forward, aggressively at that lunch, and more calmly and practically later, were quite simple ones. But they could only have come from someone like myself, someone of Africa, but with no use at all for the kind of freedom that had come to Africa.

“My idea was this. Everything had conspired to push black Africa into every kind of tyranny. As a result Africa was full of refugees, first-generation intellectuals. Western governments didn’t want to know, and the old Africa hands were in no position to understand—they were still fighting ancient wars. If Africa had a future, it lay with those refugees. My idea was to remove them from the countries where they couldn’t operate and send them, if only for a little while, to those parts of the continent where they could. A continental interchange, to give the men themselves hope, to give Africa the better news about itself, and to make a start on the true African revolution.

“The idea has worked beautifully. Every week we get requests from one university or the other where they would like to keep
some kind of intellectual life going without getting involved in local politics. Of course, we’ve attracted the usual freeloaders, black and white, and we’ve run into trouble with the professional anti-Americans. But the idea is good. I don’t feel I have to defend it. Whether it’s doing any good as of now is another matter. And perhaps we don’t have the time. You’ve seen the boys at the Domain here. You’ve seen how bright they are. But they only want jobs. They’ll do anything for that, and that’s where it may all end. There are times when I feel that Africa will simply have its own way—hungry men are hungry men. And that is when I can get very low.

“To work for an outfit like this is to live in a construct—you don’t have to tell me that. But all men live in constructs. Civilization is a construct. And this construct is my own. Within it, I am of value, just as I am. I have to put nothing on. I exploit myself. I allow no one to exploit me. And if it folds, if tomorrow the people at the top decide we’re getting nowhere, I’ve now learned that there are other ways in which I might exploit myself.