A Bend in the River (36 page)

“The geologist exercised his options and bought up the remaining shares of the company for virtually nothing. So he acquired control of our company—but all that was in the agreement. Then he bought a semi-bankrupt mining company. We wondered about this, but we didn’t question the wisdom of our man now. Then he disappeared to one of the black islands. He had linked the two companies in some way, borrowed a million dollars for our company on the strength of our oil, and transferred the money on some pretext to his own company. He left us with the debt. The oldest trick in the book, and the nine of us stood and watched while it was happening as though we were watching a man dig a hole in the road. To add insult to injury, we found out that he hadn’t put up his ten. He had done it all with our money. Now I suppose he is moving heaven and earth to transfer his million to some safe place. Anyway, that was how I achieved the impossible, converting ten into a debt of a hundred.

“In time the debt will settle itself. The oil is there. I might even
get my ten back. The trouble with people like us, running about the world with money to hide, is that we are good about business only in our own places. Still. The oil was only a sideline. What I was trying to do was to run a movie theatre, an ethnic theatre. You know the word? It means all the foreign groups in a place. It was very ethnic where I was, but I suppose I got the idea only because there was a theatre for sale, and it seemed a nice downtown property to get.

“Everything was working when I looked at the place, but when I took over I found we couldn’t get a clear picture on the screen. At first I thought it just had to do with the lenses. Then I realised that the man who had sold me the place had changed the equipment. I went to him and said, ‘You can’t do this.’ He said, ‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’ So. Well, we straightened out the projectors in the end, we improved the seating and so on. Business wasn’t too good. An ethnic theatre downtown wasn’t such a good idea. The thing about some of those ethnic groups over there is that they don’t like moving around too much. They just want to go home as fast as they can and stay there. The pictures that did well were the Indian pictures. We got a lot of Greeks then. The Greeks love Indian pictures. Did you know that? Anyway. We struggled through the summer. The cold weather came. I threw some switches for the heating. Nothing came on. There was no heating system. Or what was there had been taken away.

“I went to the man again. I said, ‘You sold me the theatre as a going concern.’ He said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘My family have been traders and merchants in the Indian Ocean for centuries, under every kind of government. There is a reason why we have lasted so long. We bargain hard, but we stick to our bargain. All our contracts are oral, but we deliver what we promise. It isn’t because we are saints. It is because the whole thing breaks down otherwise.’ He said, ‘You should go back to the Indian Ocean.’

“When I left him I walked very fast. I stumbled on an unevenness in the pavement and turned my ankle. I took that as a sign. My luck had run out; I knew that it had to. I didn’t feel I could stay in that country. I felt the place was a hoax. They thought
they were part of the West, but really they had become like the rest of us who had run to them for safety. They were like people far away, living on other people’s land and off other people’s brains, and that was all they thought they should do. That was why they were so bored and dull. I thought I would die if I stayed among them.

“When I came to England all my instincts were to go into light engineering. A small country, good roads and railways, power, every kind of industrial facility. I thought that if you identified some area, got in good equipment, and employed Asians, you couldn’t lose. Europeans are bored with machines and factories. Asian people love them; they secretly prefer factories to their family life. But after Canada I had lost my nerve. I thought I would play safe. I thought I would go into property. That was how I came to the Gloucester Road.

“It is one of the centres of the tourist trade in London, as you see. London is destroying itself for its tourist trade—you can see that here. Hundreds of houses, thousands of flats, have been emptied to provide hotels, hostels and restaurants for the tourists. Private accommodation is getting scarcer. I thought I couldn’t lose. I bought six flats in a block. I bought at the height of the boom. Prices have now dropped twenty-five percent, and interest rates have risen from twelve percent to twenty and even twenty-four percent. Do you remember the scandal on the coast when it came out that Indar’s people were lending money at ten and twelve percent? I feel I no longer understand money. And the Arabs are in the streets outside.

“I have to charge ridiculous rents to break even. And when you charge ridiculous rents you attract strange people. This is one of my souvenirs. It is a betting slip from one of the betting shops in the Gloucester Road. I keep it to remind myself of a simple girl who came down from the north. She got her Arabs mixed up. The Arab she became involved with was one of the poor ones, from Algeria. She used to dump her rubbish outside her flat door. The Algerian used to gamble on the horses. That was how they were going to make the big time.

“They won, and then they lost. They couldn’t pay the rent. I
reduced it. They still couldn’t pay. There were complaints about the rubbish and the quarrels, and the Algerian was in the habit of pissing in the lift when he was locked out. I asked them to leave. They refused, and the law was on their side. I had a new lock put in one day when they were out. When they came back they simply called the police, and the police opened up for them. To prevent me getting in again, they put in another lock. By this time, on that door, keyholes and their metal surrounds were like buttons down a shirt front. I gave up.

“Every kind of bill was unpaid. I went up one morning and knocked. The flat was full of whispers, but no one opened. The lift was close to the flat door. I opened the door of the lift and closed it. They thought I had gone down, and sure enough they opened up to check. I put my foot in the door and went in. The little flat was full of poor Arabs in undershirts and horribly coloured pants. There was bedding all over the floor. The girl wasn’t with them. They had sent her away, or she had left. So for two months, while I had been paying twenty percent interest and other charges, I had been giving free shelter to a whole tentful of poor Arabs. They are a strange people racially. One of them had bright red hair. What were they doing in London? What were they expecting to do? How are they going to survive? What place is there in the world for people like that? There are so many of them.

“Here is another girl who ran out on me. Seven hundred pounds went with her. She came from Eastern Europe. Refugee? But she was a woman. She must have spent quite a bit of money to get these photographic cards printed. Here she is, up to her neck in water; I don’t know why she thought she should put that on her card. And here she is, pretending to thumb a lift, in a kind of button-up overall open at the top, and showing a little breast. Here she is wearing a big black bowler hat and black leather trousers and sticking out her little bottom. ‘Erika. Model-Actress-Singer-Dancer. Hair: Red. Eyes: Grey-Green. Specialties: Fashion-Cosmetic-Footwear-Hands-Legs-Teeth-Hair. 5’9”. 32-25-33.’ All that, and nobody wants to buy. All that happened to her was that she became pregnant, ran up a telephone bill of
£1200—twelve hundred pounds!—and ran away one night, leaving these picture cards of herself. A big pile. I couldn’t bear to throw them all away. I felt I should keep one, for her sake.

“What happens to these people? Where do they go? How do they live? Do they go back home? Do they have homes to go back to? You’ve talked a lot, Salim, about those girls from East Africa in the tobacco kiosks, selling cigarettes at all hours of the night. They’ve depressed you. You say they don’t have a future and that they don’t even know where they are. I wonder whether that isn’t their luck. They expect to be bored, to do what they do. The people I’ve been talking about have expectations and they know they’re lost in London. I suppose it must be dreadful for them when they have to go back. This area is full of them, coming to the centre because it is all they know about and because they think it’s smart, and trying to make something out of nothing. You can’t blame them. They’re doing what they see the big people doing.

“This place is so big and busy you take some time to see that very little is happening. It’s just keeping itself going. A lot of people have been quietly wiped out. There’s no new money, no real money, and this makes everybody more desperate. We’ve come here at the wrong time. But never mind. It’s the wrong time everywhere else too. When we were in Africa in the old days, consulting our catalogues and ordering our goods and watching the ships unload in the harbour, I don’t suppose we thought it would be like this in Europe, or that the British passports we took out as protection against the Africans would actually bring us here, and that the Arabs would be in the streets outside.”

That was Nazruddin. Kareisha said, “I hope you know you’ve been listening to the story of a happy man.” She didn’t have to tell me.

Nazruddin was all right. He had made himself at home in the Gloucester Road. The London setting was strange, but Nazruddin appeared to be as he had always been. He had moved on from fifty to sixty, but he didn’t look particularly older. He still
wore his old-style suits; and the broad lapels (with the curling tips) which I associated with him were back in fashion. I didn’t think he doubted that his property venture would eventually right itself. What oppressed him (and made him talk about his luck running out) was his inactivity. But he had found in the half mile or so of the Gloucester Road, between the underground railway station and the park, the perfect retirement resort.

He bought his newspaper in one shop, read it with morning coffee in a tiny café that also offered old watercolour paintings for sale; took a turn in the park; shopped for delicacies in the various food shops. Sometimes he gave himself the luxury of tea or a drink in the big, old-fashioned lounge of the red-brick hotel near the station. Sometimes he went to the Arab or Persian “Dancing Room.” And there was the nightly excitement of television in the flat. The population of the Gloucester Road was cosmopolitan, always shifting, with people of all ages. It was a friendly, holiday place, and Nazruddin’s days were full of encounters and new observations. He said it was the best street in the world; he intended to stay there as long as he was allowed to.

He had chosen well once again. That had always been his gift, to suggest that he had chosen well. At one time it had made me anxious to find the world he had found. Nazruddin’s example, or the way in which I had secretly interpreted his experience, had after all helped to determine my life. Now in London, glad though I was to find him in good spirits, that gift of his depressed me. It made me feel that after all these years I had never caught up with him, and never would; that my life would always be unsatisfactory. It could send me back to my hotel room in an agony of solitude and dread.

Sometimes as I was falling asleep I was kicked awake by some picture that came to me of my African town—absolutely real (and the airplane could take me there tomorrow), but its associations made it dream-like. Then I remembered my illumination, about the need of men only to live, about the illusion of pain. I played off London against Africa until both became unreal, and I could fall asleep. After a time I didn’t have to call up the
illumination, the mood of that African morning. It was there, beside me, that remote vision of the planet, of men lost in space and time, but dreadfully, pointlessly busy.

It was in this state of indifference and irresponsibility—like the lost Gloucester Road people Nazruddin had spoken about—that I became engaged to Kareisha.

One day, near the end of my time in London, Kareisha said, “Have you been to see Indar? Are you going to see him?”

Indar! His name had come up often in our talk, but I didn’t know that he was in London.

Kareisha said, “That’s just as well. I wouldn’t recommend a visit or trying to get in touch or anything like that. He can be difficult and aggressive when he’s in the mood, and it isn’t funny. He’s been like that ever since his outfit folded.”

“His outfit folded?”

“About two years ago.”

“But he knew it was going to fold. He talked as though he expected it to fold. Lecturers, universities, African interchange—he knew the excitement couldn’t last, that no local government really cared one way or the other. But I thought he had his plans. He said he could exploit himself in lots of other ways.”

Kareisha said: “It was different when the time came. He cared more about his outfit than he pretended. Of course, there are many things he can do. But he’s determined not to do them. He can get a job in a university, certainly in America. He has the contacts. He can write for the papers. We don’t talk about it now when we see him. Naz’ says Indar’s become help-resistant. The trouble is he invested too much in that outfit of his. And after it folded he had that bad experience in America. A bad experience for him anyway.

“You know Indar. You know that when he was young the most important thing to him was that his family was rich. You remember the house they lived in. When you live in a house like that, I suppose you think ten or twelve or twenty times a day that you are very rich or that you are richer than nearly everybody else. And you remember how he used to get on. Not talking
about money, but it was always there. You would say that he felt that money had made him holy. All rich people are like that, I suppose. And that was one idea about himself that Indar never lost. His outfit didn’t give him back his money, but it made him holy again. It raised him again above everybody else and made him equal with the big boys of Africa, being a guest of the government in this place and that place, meeting foreign ministers and presidents. So it was a blow when the outfit folded, when the Americans decided there was nothing in it for them.

“Indar went to America, to New York. Being Indar, he stayed in an expensive hotel. He saw his American people. They were all very nice. But he didn’t like the direction in which they were pushing him. He felt they were pushing him towards smaller things and he pretended not to notice. I don’t know what Indar was expecting from these people. No, I know. He was hoping to be made one of them, to keep on at the old level. He thought that was his due. He was spending a lot of money, and the money was running out. One day, much against his will, he even looked at cheaper hotels. He didn’t want to do that because he thought that even to start looking for cheaper hotels was to admit that it soon might be over for him. He was appalled by the cheaper hotels. In New York you drop fast, he said.