A Bend in the River (5 page)

Sun and rain and bush had made the site look old, like the site of a dead civilization. The ruins, spreading over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.

With its ruins and its deprivations, Nazruddin’s town was a ghost town. And for me, as a newcomer, there was nothing like a social life. The expatriates weren’t welcoming. They had been through a lot; they still didn’t know how things were going to turn out; and they were very nervous. The Belgians, especially the younger ones, were full of resentments and a sense of injustice. The Greeks, great family men, with the aggressiveness and frustrations of family men, kept to their families and their immediate friends. There were three houses that I visited, visiting them in turn on weekdays for lunch, which had become my main meal. They were all Asian or Indian houses.

There was a couple from India. They lived in a small flat that smelled of asafoetida and was decorated with paper flowers and
brightly coloured religious prints. He was a United Nations expert of some sort who hadn’t wanted to go back to India and had stayed on doing odd jobs after his contract had expired. They were a hospitable couple and they made a point (I feel for religious reasons) of offering hospitality to frightened or stranded foreigners. They spoilt their hospitality by talking a little too much about it. Their food was too liquid and peppery for me, and I didn’t like the way the man ate. He bent his head low over his food, keeping his nose an inch or two away from his plate, and he ate noisily, slapping his lips together. While he ate like this his wife fanned him, never taking her eyes off his plate, fanning with her right hand, resting her chin on the palm of her left hand. Still, I went there twice a week, more for the sake of having somewhere to go than for the food.

The other place I went to was a rough, ranch-like house that belonged to an elderly Indian couple whose family had all gone away during the troubles. The yard was big and dusty, full of abandoned cars and trucks, the relics of a transport business in colonial days. This old couple didn’t seem to know where they were. The bush of Africa was outside their yard; but they spoke no French, no African language, and from the way they behaved you would have thought that the river just down the road was the Ganges, with temples and holy men and bathing steps. But it was soothing to be with them. They didn’t look for conversation, and were quite happy if you said nothing, if you ate and ran.

Shoba and Mahesh were the people I felt closest to, and I soon thought of them as friends. They had a shop in what ought to have been a prime commercial position, opposite the van der Weyden Hotel. Like me, they were migrants from the east and refugees from their own community. They were an extraordinarily good-looking couple; it was strange, in our town, to find people so careful of their dress and appearance. But they had lived too long apart from their fellows and had forgotten how to be curious about them. Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside. And this beautiful couple had their days of tension. Shoba, the lady, was vain and neurotic. Mahesh, the simpler partner, could be in a state of anxiety about her.

That was my life in Nazruddin’s town. I had wanted to break away and make a fresh start. But there are degrees in everything, and I felt burdened by the bareness of my days. My life was unconstricted, but narrower than it had ever been; the solitude of my evenings was like an ache. I didn’t think I had the resources to last. My comfort was that I had lost little, except time; I could always move on—though where, I didn’t yet know. And then I found I couldn’t move. I had to stay.

What I had feared would happen on the coast came to pass. There was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been finally laid low.

I first heard the news from my friends Shoba and Mahesh, who had got it from the radio—that expatriate habit of listening to the BBC news was something I had not yet got into. We treated the news as a secret, as something that had to be kept from the local people; this was one occasion when we were glad there was no local newspaper.

Then newspapers from Europe and the United States came to various people in the town and were passed around; and it was extraordinary to me that some of the newspapers could have found good words for the butchery on the coast. But people are like that about places in which they aren’t really interested and where they don’t have to live. Some papers spoke of the end of feudalism and the dawn of a new age. But what had happened was not new. People who had grown feeble had been physically destroyed. That, in Africa, was not new; it was the oldest law of the land.

Letters eventually came from the coast—in a batch—from members of my family. They were cautiously written, but their message was plain. There was no place for us on the coast; our life there was over. The family was scattering. Only old people would stay on in our family compound—a quieter life there, at last. The family servants, burdensome to the end, refusing to go away, insisting on their slave status even at this time of revolution, were being split up among the family. And one of the points of the letters was that I had to take my share.

It was not for me to choose whom I wanted; apparently I had
already been chosen by someone. One of the boys or young men from the servant houses wanted to get as far away from the coast as possible, and he had been firm about being sent “to stay with Salim.” The boy said he had always had “a special liking for Salim,” and he had made such a fuss that they had decided to send him to me. I could imagine the scene. I could imagine the screaming and the stamping and the sulking. That was how the servants got their way in our house; they could be worse than children. My father, not realising what other people in the family had written, simply said in his letter that he and my mother had decided to send someone to look after me—he meant, of course, that he was sending me a boy to look after and feed.

I couldn’t say no: the boy was on his way. That this boy had “a special liking” for me was news to me. A better reason for his choice of me was that I was just three or four years older than he was, unmarried, and more likely to put up with his wandering ways. He had always been a wanderer. We had sent him to the Koranic school when he was small, but he was always running off somewhere else, in spite of beatings by his mother. (And how he screamed in the quarters, and how his mother shouted—both of them overdoing the drama, trying to get as much attention as possible from the rest of the compound!) He was nobody’s idea of a house servant. With bed and board always provided, he was more a man about town, friendly and unreliable and full of friends, always willing, always offering to help, and never doing a quarter of what he promised.

He turned up at the flat one evening in one of Daulat’s trucks, not long after I had got the letters saying that he had been sent. And my heart went out to him: he looked so altered, so tired and frightened. He was still living with the shock of events on the coast; and he hadn’t liked the journey across Africa at all.

He had done the first half of the journey by the railway, which travelled at an average speed of ten miles an hour. Then he had transferred to buses and finally to Daulat’s trucks: in spite of wars, bad roads and worn-out vehicles, Daulat, a man of our community, maintained a trucking service between our town and the eastern frontier. Daulat’s drivers helped the boy past the various officials. But the mixed-race man about town from the
coast was still African enough to be unsettled by his passage through the strange tribes of the interior. He couldn’t bring himself to eat their food, and he hadn’t eaten for days. Without knowing it, he had made in reverse the journey which some of his ancestors had made a century or more before.

He threw himself into my arms, converting the Muslim embrace into a child’s clinging. I patted him on the back, and he took this as a signal to scream the place down. Right away, between screams and bawls, he began telling me about the killings he had seen in the market at home.

I didn’t take in all that he was saying. I was worried about the neighbours, and trying to get him to tone down the screaming, trying to get him to understand that that kind of showing-off slave behaviour (which it partly was) was all right on the coast, but that people here wouldn’t understand. He was beginning to go on a little bit, too, about the savagery of the
kafar,
the Africans, behaving as though my flat was the family compound and he could shout anything he wanted about people outside. And all the time Daulat’s friendly African loader was coming up the external staircase with luggage—not much, but in many small, awkward pieces: a few bundles, a wickerwork laundry basket, some cardboard boxes.

I broke away from the bawling boy—to pay attention was to encourage him—and I dealt with the loader, walking out with him to the street to tip him. The bawling in the flat upstairs died down, as I had expected; solitude and the strangeness of the flat were having their effect; and when I went back up I refused to hear any more from the boy until he had had something to eat.

He became quiet and correct, and while I prepared some baked beans and cheese on toast he brought out, from his bundles and boxes, the things that had been sent me by my family. Ginger and sauces and spices from my mother. Two family photographs from my father, and a wall print on cheap paper of one of our holy places in Gujarat, showing it as a modern place, though: the artist had put in motorcars and motorbikes and bicycles and even trains pell-mell in the surrounding streets. It was my father’s way of saying that, modern as I was, I would return to the faith.

“I was in the market, Salim,” the boy said, after he had eaten. “At first I thought it was just a quarrel around Mian’s stall. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were behaving as though knives didn’t cut, as though people weren’t made of flesh. I couldn’t believe it. At the end it was as if a pack of dogs had got into a butcher’s stall. I saw arms and legs bleeding and lying about. Just like that. They were still there the next day, those arms and legs.”

I tried to stop him. I didn’t want to hear more. But it wasn’t easy to stop him. He went on about those cut-off arms and legs that belonged to people we had known since we were children. It was terrible, what he had seen. But I was also beginning to feel that he was trying to excite himself to cry a little bit more after he had stopped wanting to cry. I felt that it worried him to find that from time to time he was forgetting, and thinking of other things. He seemed to be wanting to thrill himself again and again; and this disturbed me.

In a few days, though, he thawed out. And the events of the coast were never spoken of again. He settled down more easily than I expected. I had expected him to go sulky and withdrawn; I had thought, especially after his unhappy journey, that he would have hated our backward town. But he liked it; and he liked it because he was himself liked, in a way he hadn’t been before.

Physically he was quite different from the local people. He was taller, more muscular, looser and more energetic in his movements. He was admired. The local women, with their usual free ways, made no secret of finding him desirable—calling out to him in the street, and stopping and staring with wicked, half-smiling (and slightly crossed) eyes that appeared to say: “Consider this a joke, and laugh. Or take it seriously.” My own way of looking at him changed. He ceased to be one of the boys from the servant houses. I saw what the local people saw; in my own eyes he became more handsome and distinctive. To the local people he wasn’t quite an African, and he aroused no tribal uneasiness; he was an exotic with African connections whom they wanted to claim. He flourished. He picked up the local language fast, and he even got a new name.

At home we had called him Ali or—when we wanted to suggest the special wild and unreliable nature of this Ali—Ali-wa (“Ali! Ali! But where is this Ali-wa?”). He rejected his name now. He preferred to be called Metty, which was what the local people called him. It was some time before I understood that it wasn’t a real name, that it was just the French word
métis,
someone of mixed race. But that wasn’t how I used it. To me it was only a name: Metty.

Here, as on the coast, Metty was a wanderer. He had the bedroom just across the passage from the kitchen; it was the first door on the right as you came in from the landing of the external staircase. I often heard him coming in late at night. That was the freedom he had come to me for. But the Metty who enjoyed that freedom was a different person from the boy who had arrived bawling and screaming, with the manners of the servant house. He had quickly shed those manners; he had developed a new idea of his worth. He became useful in the shop; and in the flat, his wandering habits—which I had dreaded—kept his presence light. But he was always there, and in the town he was like one of my own. He lessened my solitude and made the empty months more bearable—months of waiting for trade to start up again. As, very slowly, it was beginning to do.

We fell into the routine of morning coffee at the flat, shop, separate lunches, shop, separate evenings. Man and master sometimes met, as equals with equal needs, in the dark little bars that began to appear in our town, signs of reawakening life: rough little cells with roofs of corrugated iron, no ceilings, concrete walls painted dark blue or green, red concrete floors.

In one such place Metty put the seal on our new relationship one evening. When I entered I saw him dancing fantastically—slim-waisted, narrow-hipped, wonderfully made. He stopped as soon as he saw me—his servant’s instinct. But then he bowed and made a show of welcoming me as though he owned the place. He said, in the French accent he had picked up, “I must do nothing indecent in front of the
patron.”
And that was precisely what he went on to do.