Sir Vidia's Shadow (10 page)

“Keep Pat company,” Vidia would say. He was wholly occupied with his book.

I wondered what his words meant and wanted them to be less ambiguous, or for her to take the initiative. I was twenty-four and still missed Yomo badly, although in Kampala I sometimes took women home from the Gardenia bar.

Pat and I drove to nearby villages or to Eldoret, where there was a post office. We went for walks. It was not unusual to stumble across an African couple rutting, or a boy chasing a girl through a field, or to hear, as we did one day, shrieks of pleasure from a corn field. This sort of thing roused me. Pat appeared not to notice, as a well-bred woman will avert her eyes from two dogs copulating in the road. She was friendly and receptive but always polite. Was her politeness her way of keeping her distance?

Wooing was unknown to me. I did not know anything about the rituals of English courtship. I had so far, in the four years I had lived in Africa, made love only to African women. That sex had liberated me and given me a habit of straightforwardness. Once I asked an American woman in Kampala if she was interested in having sex. She said, “You'll have to be a little subtler than that,” and when I attempted subtlety—though I knew it was too late—she confessed that she was a virgin. I was so shocked at her innocence I lectured her, warning her to be more careful. We were all dogs here, I said.

“Come home with me. I want to make love to you,” I would say, but the statement was even blunter and without euphemism in Chichewa or Swahili. It was as unambiguous as describing the insertion of a cork in a bottle, but wasn't that better?

“
Mimi nyama, wewe kisu
” usually worked when I said it with a smile. I am the meat, you are the knife.

“No,” one woman laughed. “
You
are the knife,
I
am the meat.”

“
Sisi nyama mbili
,” I said. We're both meat.

Sometimes no words were necessary. Just being alone with a woman in Africa meant that you had complete freedom. She might not say “Let's do it,” she might make no sound at all. Her silence or her smile meant yes. I had lived what I felt was a repressed life in the United States. It was a relief that no negotiation was necessary. If I met a woman I liked, I soon mentioned sex. It seemed to me, and nearly always to the woman, that what was being proposed was no more serious, or lengthy, than a game of cards.

“I have given up sex,” Vidia had said to me. The statement strangely teased me. I regarded Pat in light of that disclosure and saw both timidity and hunger and a hint of frail susceptibility that only made her more desirable.

We went for walks and were often together, yet I could not find the words to broach this subject. I had no technique and I knew straightforwardness would not work. She was simply too polite and circumspect for me to speak bluntly to her. I wished that she would help me, either by frankly putting me off or encouraging me. Her politeness was like the reaction of a coquette, and perversely that attracted me as much as her delicate face and pale damp eyes and lovely hair—only thirty-three, and yet her hair was silver-gray, another provocation.

She caught me staring at her one day and she became self-conscious. “My clothes have shrunk so,” she explained, and tugged with her tiny fingers. Tight slacks, tight blouse, and her pretty lips. This never went further than my lingering gaze, but my feelings of desire for his wife made me guiltily hearty towards Vidia whenever Pat and I returned to the hotel from a walk or a ride. I would not know until much later that in the novel he was writing, Vidia's Indian narrator-hero's English wife, who somewhat resembled Pat (a whole page was devoted to the pleasures of her breasts), has an affair with a young American. The narrator looks on; the American who cuckolds him is “slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him.”

Eldoret had a noisy bar on a back street called the Highlands. In spite of the music there were not many people inside, and most of them were women from that area, very dark, from the lakeshore town of Kisumu. I went to the Highlands one night after dropping Pat at the hotel. I took a seat at a table and saw an African woman nearby smiling at me. Her face gleamed like iron in the badly lighted bar.

“
Mumpa cigara
.”

I gave her one and asked in Swahili, “Do you want a drink?”

“Yes. If you buy it, I want a
pombe
,” the woman said, and joined me.

“So what are you doing?” I asked.

“I have been waiting for you,” she said.

This is how it should always be, I thought, because I knew that it would not be a question of if or when, but merely of finding a quiet place afterwards where we would not be disturbed.

 

The car the Naipauls had acquired before leaving Kampala, the tan Peugeot, was a popular model in East Africa; it was used as a bush taxi because of its solid suspension and reliable engine. Their driver's name was Aggrey. His English was poor. He often told me in Swahili what he wished to communicate to the
bwana
. When, as frequently happened, Vidia was annoyed with him, he pleaded with me to explain why the
bwana
was angry. I was never privy to Vidia's petulance, and it could last for days at a time, like the master-servant fury in a Russian novel. While it was in progress, Vidia drove the car himself and made Aggrey sit in the back seat. It was a cruel reversal of roles, and as Vidia was an erratic driver—he had never before owned a car—it was a peculiarly humiliating punishment for the driver to be turned into a passenger, stuck in the traditional
bwana'
s seat while the
bwana
blunderingly chauffeured him.

To Vidia, all of East Africa was a single maddening place, but anyone who lived there knew it was three distinct countries. Uganda Protectorate had had a peaceful transition to independence. Tanzania, perversely ideological, was a Maoist experiment throughout the sixties: the leaders wore Mao suits and parroted Chinese slogans, and in return for this flattery (the Cultural Revolution had just begun) the Chinese began building a railway that would connect Dar es Salaam with Zambia. Kenya was a cranky tribalistic place with polarized political parties and deep regional and ethnic resentments. The Mau Mau conflict, still fresh in people's memories, had been violent and divisive, full of rumors of ritual murder and blood ceremonies and cannibalism. Kenya had been a battleground and was now presided over by the sly and sententious old warrior Jomo Kenyatta, who regularly extorted money from foreign governments and Indian businessmen. The governments played along, but sometimes businessmen jibbed and refused to pay up.

Six Indian businessmen who refused to pay were deported from Kenya while Vidia was at the Kaptagat Arms. Vidia inquired and discovered what we had known all along, that Indians in Nairobi had helped lead the Kenyan struggle for independence. They had been discriminated against by the British, barred from living in certain areas, forbidden to grow cash crops, and kept out of clubs. After
uhuru
(independence) they were treated shabbily by Kenyatta's government. Now some were being thrown out.

Vidia was visibly a
muhindi
, an Indian. Even he said that he had gone several shades darker in the equatorial sun. His bush hat and walking stick were a poor disguise. He was now living in a country where a
muhindi
was unwelcome. “Bloody Asian” was one of the less offensive ways Africans in Kenya referred to Indians, and
muhindi
was what the Kaptagat's servants called Vidia when they spoke among themselves.

Tough-minded, Vidia reacted in much the same way as he had in Uganda. Whenever he met Indians in Kenya, he challenged them, demanding to know their backup plans in case of trouble. He called it “crunch time.” “Very well then,” he would say after the first pleasantries, “what are you going to do when crunch time comes?” He urged them to leave for India or Britain and to take their money with them—to teach the Africans a lesson. He quoted the
Gita
. He said, “You must act.” But they smiled uneasily and said that he did not understand. He decided that Pat and I should go with him to Nairobi to discuss this matter with the Indian high commissioner and the U.S. ambassador.

“Do you remember what I told you?” he said to me as we drove through the Rift Valley
(Beware of Fallen Rocks
) toward Nairobi. “Hate the oppressor, but always fear the oppressed.”

I recognized the tone of voice from the main character in his novel in progress. It was also often Vidia's own tone of voice. Vidia and his hero agreed on most things, it seemed. They even used the same expressions, or “locutions,” as they called them: “latterly,” “crunch time,” “some little time.”

“I have been contemplating this visit to Nairobi for some little time,” Vidia said. “Yes. Some little time.”

Nearer the Rift Valley escarpment we saw a sign saying
Hussain Co. Ltd. Sheepskin Coats for Sale
. Vidia said he wanted to see them, though I suspected he merely wished to lecture Mr. Hussain. The coats were cheap. They were thick and bulky. Mr. Hussain took our measurements and said he would make the coats to order. He would send them in a month or so.

“And what are you going to do when the crunch comes?” Vidia said to Mr. Hussain after we paid our money.

“I have plan,” Mr. Hussain said, wagging his head ambiguously.

When we were back on the road Vidia said, “He was lying, of course,” and then, “I wonder if I can bring it off?”

He was speaking of the sheepskin coat.

“Of course you can,” Pat said from the back seat, always the encouraging spouse.

“Perhaps in Scotland,” Vidia said.

There were giraffes in the distance, crossing the valley, and a herd of grazing zebras and clusters of gazelles.

“Frosty weather. Snow. I can see that coat being useful. But I don't know whether I can bring it off. I don't think I'm big enough in the shoulders.” After a moment he said, “Paul, you must come to London. Meet real people. Bring your sheepskin.”

Nairobi was a small town with wide streets and a colonial air. “Mimicry,” Vidia said, but he liked the Norfolk Hotel, its cleanness, its comfort. He quoted his narrator on the subject of hotels. After we checked in, he said he had the address of a Nigerian man here in Nairobi who had access to the Kenyans. At first Vidia wondered if it might be too much trouble—Pat had already decided to stay behind in the hotel room—but then he grew curious. It was always this curiosity that overcame his reluctance. The Nigerian at the very least would have a West African point of view. His name was Muhammed, and he was a Hausa, from the north of his country. He met us at the door of his apartment wearing a blue pinstriped double-breasted suit. Vidia introduced himself.

“Jolly good,” Muhammed said. He led us to a room with a large bookcase and offered us tea.

“That would be very nice,” Vidia said.

“What about some music?”

There were stacks of record albums on one shelf.

“No music. No music.”

“Jolly good.”

While we drank tea, Muhammed spoke with Vidia about the persecution of Indians in Nairobi, but instead of interrogating him, Vidia grew laconic and impatient. I just looked at the books. I saw
Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Kama Sutra, Naked Lunch, Lolita, Lollipop Lady, A Manual for Lovers
, and others—variations on a theme.

Vidia was rising. “We must go.”

Muhammed, stopped in midsentence, said, “Jolly good.”

In the car, Vidia said he was disgusted.

“What's wrong?”

He made a nauseated face at Muhammed's building and said, “Masturbator!”

It took him a while to calm down, but when his mood eased I said, “I have to see Tom Hopkinson.”

“Hopkinson? The chap who was editor of
Picture Post
? He's in Bongo-Wongo?”

“Yes. Want to come?”

“One has no interest.”

I dropped Vidia at the hotel and spent the afternoon with Tom Hopkinson. He was a well-known editor and journalist, and his highly successful
Picture Post
had been Britain's answer to
Life
magazine. Hopkinson, in vigorous semi-retirement, ran the Institute of Journalism in Nairobi. It was my hope that he would come to Kampala and speak about freedom of the press at a conference I was trying to organize. A tall, thin, white-haired man, he was friendly and straightforward and clearly a Londoner: wearing a tie and long trousers and black shoes, he was overdressed for Kenya. We talked about novels—he had published two. He said he was too busy to give the lecture, but I suspected the rumors of violence in Uganda put him off. Most people in Kenya regarded Uganda as the bush.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said that evening in the Norfolk's bar. He said nothing else, but I knew it was his way of asking about Hopkinson.

“He's writing a novel,” I said.

“Oh, God.”

“It's his third.”

“Oh, God.”

“He spoiled the first two, he said. He rushed them. He said he was not going to rush this one.”

Vidia gagged on his tea and released great lungfuls of laughter, his smoker's laugh that was so fruity and echoey.

“He's just playing with art.”

“He was a friend of George Orwell,” I said.

“One has been compared to Orwell,” Vidia said. “It is not much of a compliment, is it?”

 

The Indian high commissioner in Nairobi, Prem Bhatia, gave a dinner party for Vidia. Now, as at the Kaptagat, I saw a contented Vidia: a respected visitor in the house of a man who admired his work. This role of guest of honor calmed Vidia and made him portentous and unfunny and overformal, and at the table he became orotund.

“One has been contemplating for some little time...”

Bhatia had been a distinguished journalist in India. He had lively talkative teenage children and the sort of ambassadorial household that was like a real family. It was not a stuffy party. Two dining tables had been set up in the courtyard of the residence for the Kenyan, Indian, and English guests. Vidia and his host sat at a head table.