A Bend in the River (30 page)

The Youth Guard used up a lot of its stock on one of its Saturday-afternoon children’s marches. These marches were hurried, ragged affairs—blue shirts, hundreds of busy little legs, white canvas shoes, some of the smaller children frantic, close to tears, regularly breaking into a run to keep up with their district group, everybody anxious to get to the end and then to get back home, which could be many miles away.

The march with the President’s booklet was raggeder than usual. The afternoon was overcast and heavy, after early morning rain; and the mud in the streets, drying out, had reached the nasty stage where bicycles and even footsteps caused it to fly about in sticky lumps and pellets. Mud stained the children’s canvas shoes red and looked like wounds on their black legs.

The children were meant to hold up the President’s book as they marched and to shout the long African name the President had given himself. But the children hadn’t been properly drilled;
the shouts were irregular; and since the clouds had rolled over black, and it looked as though it was going to rain again soon, the marchers were in a greater hurry than usual. They just held the little book and scampered in the gloom, spattering one another with mud, shouting only when the Youth Guard shouted at them.

The marches were already something of a joke to our people, and this didn’t help. Most people, even people from the deep bush, understood what the madonna cult was about. But I don’t think anyone in the squares or the market had any idea what the
Maximes
march was about. I don’t think, to tell the truth, that even Mahesh knew what it referred to or was modelled on, until he was told.

So
Maximes
failed with us. And it must have been so in other parts of the country as well, because shortly after reporting the great demand for the book, the newspapers dropped the subject.

Raymond, speaking of the President, said: “He knows when to pull back. That has always been one of his great virtues. No one understands better than he the cruel humour of his people. And he may finally decide that he is being badly advised.”

Raymond was still waiting, then. In what I had seen as his code I began to recognize a stubbornness and something like vanity. But Yvette now didn’t even bother to conceal her impatience. She was bored with the subject of the President. Raymond might have nowhere else to go. But Yvette was restless. And that was a bad sign for me.

Mahesh was my friend. But I thought of him as a man who had been stunted by his relationship with Shoba. That had been achievement enough for him. Shoba admired him and needed him, and he was therefore content with himself, content with the person she admired. His only wish seemed to be to take
care of this person. He dressed for her, preserved his looks for her. I used to think that when Mahesh considered himself physically he didn’t compare himself with other men, or judge himself according to some masculine ideal, but saw only the body that pleased Shoba. He saw himself as his woman saw him; and that was why, though he was my friend, I thought that his devotion to Shoba had made him half a man, and ignoble.

I had longed myself for an adventure, for passion and physical fulfilment, but I never thought that it would take me in that way, that all my idea of my own worth would be bound up with the way a woman responded to me. But that was how it was. All my self-esteem came from being Yvette’s lover, from serving her and pleasing her in the physical way I did.

That was my pride. It was also my shame, to have reduced my manhood just to that. There were times, especially during slack periods in the shop, when I sat at my desk (Yvette’s photographs in the drawer) and found myself mourning. Mourning, in the midst of a physical fulfilment which could not have been more complete! There was a time when I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

And so much had come to me through Yvette. I had got to know so much more. I had lost the expatriate businessman’s way of not appearing to take too much notice of things, which could end up in genuine backwardness. I had been given so many ideas about history, political power, other continents. But with all my new knowledge, my world was narrower than it had ever been. In events around me—like the publication of the President’s book, and the book march—I looked only to see whether the life I had with Yvette was threatened or was going to go on. And the narrower my world became, the more obsessively I lived in it.

Even so, it was a shock when I heard that Noimon had sold up and left, to go to Australia. Noimon was our biggest businessman, the Greek with a finger in every pie. He had come out to the country as a very young man at the end of the war to work on one of the Greek coffee plantations in the deep bush. Though speaking only Greek when he came, he had done very well very quickly, acquiring plantations of his own and then a furniture
business in the town. Independence had appeared to wipe him out; but he had stayed put. At the Hellenic Club—which he treated like his private charity, and ruled, having kept it going through very bad times—he used to say that the country was his home.

All during the boom Noimon had been reinvesting and expanding; at one time he had offered Mahesh a lot of money for the Bigburger property. He had a way with officials and was good at getting government contracts (he had furnished the houses in the Domain). And now he had sold up secretly to some of the newfangled state trading agencies in the capital. We could only guess at the foreign-exchange ins and outs, and the hidden beneficiaries, of that deal; the newspaper in the capital announced it as a kind of nationalization, with fair compensation.

His departure left us all feeling a little betrayed. We also felt foolish, caught out. Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom. And Nazruddin had warned me. I remembered his little lecture about the difference between the businessman and the man who was really only a mathematician. The businessman bought at ten and was happy to get out at twelve; the mathematician saw his ten rise to eighteen, but didn’t sell because he wanted to double his ten to twenty.

I had done better than that. What (using Nazruddin’s scale) I had bought at two I had taken over the years to twenty. But now, with Noimon’s departure, it had dropped to fifteen.

Noimon’s departure marked the end of our boom, the end of confidence. We all knew that. But at the Hellenic Club—where only a fortnight before, throwing dust in our eyes, Noimon had been talking in his usual practical way about improving the swimming pool—we put a brave face on things.

I heard it said that Noimon had sold up only for the sake of his children’s education; it was also said that he had been pressured by his wife (Noimon was rumoured to have a second, half-African family). And then it began to be said that Noimon would regret his decision. Copper was copper, the boom was going to go on, and while the Big Man was in charge, everything
would keep on running smoothly. Besides, though Australia and Europe and North America were nice places to visit, life there wasn’t as rosy as some people thought—and Noimon, after a lifetime in Africa, was going to find that out pretty soon. We lived better where we were, with servants and swimming pools, luxuries that only millionaires had in those other places.

It was a lot of nonsense. But they had to say what they said, though that point about the swimming pools was especially stupid, because in spite of the foreign technicians our water supply system had broken down. The town had grown too fast, and too many people were still coming in; in the shanty towns the emergency standpipes used to run all day long; and water was now rationed everywhere. Some of the swimming pools—and we didn’t have so many—had been drained. In some the filtering machinery had simply been turned off—economy or inexperience—and those pools had become choked with brilliant green algae and wilder growths, and looked like poisonous forest ponds. But the swimming pools existed, whatever their condition, and people could talk about them as they did because here we liked the idea of the swimming pool better than the thing itself. Even when the pools worked they hadn’t been used much; it was as if we hadn’t yet learned to fit this bothersome luxury into our day-to-day life.

I reported the Hellenic Club chatter back to Mahesh, expecting him to share my attitude or at least to see the joke, bad as the joke was for us.

But Mahesh didn’t see the joke. He, too, made the point about the superior quality of our life in the town.

He said, “I’m glad Noimon has gone. Let him get a taste of the good life out there. I hope he relishes it. Shoba has some Ismaili friends in London. They’re having a
very
nice taste of the life over there. It isn’t all Harrods. They’ve written to Shoba. Ask her. She will tell you about her London friends. What they call a big house over there would be like a joke to us here. You’ve seen the salesmen at the van der Weyden. That’s expenses. Ask them how they live back home. None of them live as well as I live here.”

I thought later that it was the “I” in Mahesh’s last sentence that offended me. Mahesh could have put it better. That “I” gave me a glimpse of what had enraged Indar about his lunch with Mahesh and Shoba. Indar had said: “They don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. They don’t even know where I’ve been.” He had seen what I hadn’t seen: it was news to me that Mahesh thought he was living “well.” in the way he meant.

I hadn’t noticed any great change in his style. He and Shoba still lived in their concrete flat with the sitting room full of shiny things. But Mahesh wasn’t joking. Standing in his nice clothes by his imported coffee machine in his franchise-given shop, he really thought he was something, successful and complete, really thought he had made it and had nowhere higher to go. Bigburger and the boom—and Shoba, always there—had destroyed his sense of humour. And I used to think of him as a fellow survivor!

But it wasn’t for me to condemn him or the others. I was like them. I, too, wanted to stay with what I had; I, too, hated the idea that I might have been caught. I couldn’t say, as they did, that all was still for the best. But that, in effect, was my attitude. The very fact that the boom had passed its peak, that confidence had been shaken, became for me a good enough reason for doing nothing. That was how I explained the position to Nazruddin when he wrote from Uganda.

Nazruddin hardly wrote. But he was still gathering experience, his mind was still ticking over; and though his letters made me nervous before I opened them, I always read them with pleasure, because over and above his personal news there was always some new general point that Nazruddin wanted to make. We were still so close to our shock about Noimon that I thought, when Metty brought the letter from the post office, that the letter was going to be about Noimon or about the prospects for copper. But it was about Uganda. They were having their problems there too.

Things were bad in Uganda, Nazruddin wrote. The army people who had taken over had appeared to be all right at first, but now there were clear signs of tribal and racial troubles. And these troubles weren’t just going to blow over. Uganda was beautiful,
fertile, easy, without poverty, and with high African traditions. It ought to have had a future, but the problem with Uganda was that it wasn’t big enough. The country was now too small for its tribal hatreds. The motorcar and modern roads had made the country too small; there would always be trouble. Every tribe felt more threatened in its territory now than in the days when everybody, including traders from the coast like our grandfathers, went about on foot, and a single trading venture could take up to a year. Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time. It was better to read the signs right than to hope that things would work out.

So for the third time in his life Nazruddin was thinking of moving and making a fresh start, this time out of Africa, in Canada. “But my luck is running out. I can see it in my hand.”

The letter, in spite of its disturbing news, was in Nazruddin’s old, calm style. It offered no direct advice and made no direct requests. But it was a reminder—as it was intended to be, especially at this time of upheaval for him—of my bargain with Nazruddin, my duty to his family and mine. It deepened my panic. At the same time it strengthened my resolve to stay and do nothing.

I replied in the way I have said, outlining our new difficulties in the town. I took some time to reply, and when I did I found myself writing passionately, offering Nazruddin the picture of myself as someone incompetent and helpless, one of his “mathematicians.” And nothing that I wrote wasn’t true. I was as helpless as I presented myself. I didn’t know where I could go on to. I didn’t think—after what I had seen of Indar and other people in the Domain—that I had the talent or the skills to survive in another country.

And it was as if I had been caught out by my own letter. My panic grew, and my guilt, and my feeling that I was provoking my own destruction. And out of this, out of a life which I felt to be shrinking and which became more obsessed as it shrank, I began to question myself. Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I—like Mahesh with his new idea of what he was—possessed by
myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette? To serve her in the way I did, it was necessary to look outward from myself. Yet it was in this selflessness that my own fulfilment lay; I doubted, after my brothel life, whether I could be a man in that way with any other woman. She gave me the idea of my manliness I had grown to need. Wasn’t my attachment to her an attachment to that idea?