Sir Vidia's Shadow (11 page)

As an elderly Sikh servant in a red turban poured wine, Bhatia followed him and said, “Now do enjoy your wine, but be very careful of the glasses. They cost five guineas each. I had them sent from London.”

Hearing this, one of the Englishmen picked up his wine, drank it down, and flung the glass over his shoulder at the courtyard wall. The glass made a soft watery smash as it hit the flagstones.

There was a sudden hush. Bhatia kept smiling and said nothing. The Englishman laughed crazily—he might have been drunk. His wife, her head down, was whispering.

“Infy.” It was spoken loudly from the head table.

After the party, when all the guests had gone and the servants had withdrawn, Vidia talked in his pompous visiting-elder-statesman manner, which was also the tone of his narrator, whom he had told me was a politician. The subject was the Indians who had been deported.

“This is disgraceful,” Vidia said. “How are you planning to respond?”

“We've lodged a very strong protest,” Bhatia said.

“You must do more than that,” Vidia said. “India is a big, powerful country. It is a major power.”

“Of course—”

“Remind the Africans of that. Latterly, the Africans have behaved as though they were dealing with just another shabby little country. Latterly—”

“I've sent a letter.”

“Send a gunboat.”

“A gunboat?”

“A punitive mission.”

“I don't think so.”

“Shell Mombasa.”

“Who would do this?”

“The Indian Navy,” Vidia said. “One has thought about this extensively. Send the Indian Navy on maneuvers off the Kenyan coast. Anchor off Mombasa—a fleet of ships. Remind them that India is a formidable country. Shell Mombasa.”

The high commissioner was frowning.

“Punish them,” Vidia said. “When Mombasa is in flames they will think twice about persecuting Indians here. Aren't there fuel depots in Mombasa? Yes, they will leave the Indians alone for some little time.”

The following noon we were having drinks by the pool at the residence of the American ambassador, William Attwood. Vidia was in the midst of his punitive-mission speech when, without prelude, a large, smiling, familiar-looking African appeared. He said he wished to consult with the ambassador. They went into the house.

“He's asking for money, of course,” Vidia said. “What else would he want? And did you see how fat he is? He's just another thug.”

After ten minutes the ambassador returned. He said the man was Tom Mboya, a leading politician and government minister.

“Mah-boya,” Vidia said.

“Very impressive man,” Attwood said. “Mboya's going to be the next president of Kenya.”

Vidia simply stared. He was thinking, Fat thug.

Mboya never became president. Within a few years he was murdered by his political enemies.

The ambassador's wife joined us for lunch while Vidia continued describing the maneuvers in a possible punitive mission. The rant may have made the ambassador nervous, for, passing the sugar tongs to his wife, he bobbled them and dropped them. They skittered toward the edge of the pool and fell in.

“Never mind,” Attwood said.

We stared as the silver thing swayed downward and settled into the deep end of the pool.

Vidia said, “Do you have a bathing costume that would fit me?”

“Lots in the changing room there,” said Attwood. “We keep them for visitors.”

Vidia excused himself and was back in a few minutes wearing a blue bathing suit. Without a word he dived neatly in and propelled himself to the bottom—eight feet or so—and brought up the dripping sugar tongs, which he handed over. While the ambassador was still marveling at his athleticism, Vidia changed his clothes, and lunch resumed.

It was a reminder of his island childhood. He had been brought up near water and was clearly a wonderful swimmer—I could see it in the way he had launched himself off the edge of the pool, diving with hardly a splash, going deep without apparent effort. At that moment I saw him as a skinny child, diving off a splintery pier in Trinidad, in view of the anchored cruise ships. All his pomposity had fallen away and he had become graceful, a child of the islands.

The ambassador thanked us for coming.

“I think he needed to hear that,” Vidia said of his proposal to shell Mombasa and set it aflame. “Did you notice how attentive he was? He at least realizes there is a problem. I know your people can do something.”

Over the next few days, in Nairobi's Indian restaurants and shops, Vidia demanded to know what the Indians would do when they were expelled. They had no future in Africa, he said. They had to make plans for crunch time now.

“Yet one has a vibration that the Indians won't rise to the occasion,” he said to me.

Passing Khannum's Fancy Goods shop on Queen's Road, Pat said she wanted to buy a few yards of printed cloth to use as a dust cover for a table in the room at the Kaptagat. Vidia and I waited on the verandah, where a small Indian girl of about seven or eight was sitting on a wooden bench being fanned by her African ayah. The girl wore a pink sari and long Punjabi bloomers and had the prim look of a child on her way to a party.

“
Jina lako
nam?” I said to the girl, asking her name in Swahili.

The ayah smiled and nudged her gently, a tender gesture that made the girl recoil and scowl at the servant in a bratty way. Vidia sighed—perhaps because I was speaking Swahili, perhaps because of the little-princess look of the skinny girl in her partygoing sari.

“
Wewe najua Kiswahili?
” I asked. Did she speak Swahili?

The ayah made the soft tooth-sucking cluck with pursed lips that meant yes in East Africa, but no sooner had she sounded this cluck—answering for the girl—than her mistress, silly little
toto
, scowled again and folded her arms.

“I am knowing wery vell how to speak Inglis!” she said.

“What a horrible child,” Vidia said, looking away. “People are always writing magazine pieces about children—parents and children. They are foolish. I have no children. My publisher, André Deutsch, has no children. My editor has no children. It has been a conscious decision. People say, ‘You'd have lovely children'—the Indian-English thing. I do not want children. I do not want to read about children. I do not want to see them.”

Watching Vidia, the little girl seemed to understand that she was being insulted. Her large eyes had darkened with anger, and as she looked up at the man maligning her, Pat came out of the shop and said, “Hello. What a sweet little girl. What's your name?”

“Nadira.”

I might have misheard. She spoke just as we were stepping off the verandah into the sunshine, but at the sound of her sharp voice, like the squawk of a mechanical toy, the three of us glanced back—Pat smiling, Vidia frowning in contempt. I was shaking my head, thinking,
Wahindi!

Time is so strange in its logic and revelation. The little girl would go to Pakistan, and after thirty years passed (and Pat lay dying in a spruced-up cottage that was at that Nairobi moment tumbledown and lived in by a pair of elderly Wiltshire peasants) Vidia would meet the girl again, now grown up and divorced, never guessing where he had first seen her—nor would she—and fall in love.

How were we to know that little girl being fanned on the Nairobi verandah by her African ayah would be the future Lady Naipaul?

 

Back at the Kaptagat Arms, Vidia resumed his novel. He was also reading a Victorian account of travels in West Africa in which he came across the expression “our sable brethren.” He began using the expression, building sentences with his other favorite phrases: “For some little time, our sable brethren...”

Before I left for Uganda he asked me, “So what are our sable brethren up to in Kampy, eh?”

There were rumors of trouble in Uganda, though nothing to do with Indians. I said, “People say there's going to be a showdown between Obote and the Kabaka.”

“One will watch from here,” he said. “Eh, Patsy? Latterly, one has begun to think that one's returning to Uganda would be completely foolish. Anyway, we were thinking of spending some little time in Tanganyika.”

The country had changed its name to Tanzania five years before, at independence, but Vidia went on using its colonial name, as he did Ghana's, always calling Ghana the Gold Coast. When he saw that using these names enraged Africans he did it even more, teasing them. He pretended not to know the new names, and when he was angrily corrected, he said “Really” and expressed effusive thanks.

From Dar es Salaam he reported “extensive buggery” and asked for news.

The news was bad in Uganda. This was in late May 1966, during the confrontation between the prime minister and the Kabaka—King Freddy. One Sunday four of the king's important chiefs were arrested on charges of sedition. Because they were so closely linked to the king, the chiefs' subjects, their villagers, became a mob and stoned the police. Early the next morning the Uganda Special Forces, commanded by Idi Amin, launched an attack on the Kabaka's palace at Lubiri.

All day there was fighting—the sound of cannon fire and automatic rifles firing in stuttering enfilade, raking the bamboo pickets of the stockade. From my office desk at Makerere I could see smoke rising from Lubiri. The shooting was continuous. In late afternoon there were still gunshots, and much darker smoke—the fires had taken hold.

“The Kabaka is holding them off with a machine gun,” my colleague Kwesiga said.

No one knew what was happening, though.

“Whose side are you on?” I asked him.

Kwesiga was of the Chiga tribe from the Rwanda border, a despised people who practiced wife inheritance—passing the widow on to the dead husband's brother—which was based on a curious marriage ceremony that involved the bride's urinating on the clasped hands of the groom and all his brothers. One of the wedding-night rituals required the bride to fight the husband, and should he prove weak—for she was expected to struggle hard—his elder brother was allowed to take charge, and subdue and ravish the woman while the groom looked on. Kwesiga was being summoned to take his recently widowed sister-in-law as one of his wives.

“I am an emotional socialist,” he said. “But Freddy is a good king.”

In the evening the explosions were louder—mortars, perhaps. And flames were visible where during the day there had been smoke. At last the palace was captured, but when Amin and his men rushed inside, the Kabaka was not there. The clumsy siege of this wood and bamboo palace had taken an entire day and had not accomplished its objective. The Kabaka had escaped to Burundi—dressed as a bar girl, one rumor went.

That was the first night of a curfew. It was illegal to be out of the house from seven in the evening until six in the morning. It was still light at seven, so confinement in bright daylight seemed strange. The enforced captivity and severe censorship also produced many rumors, often conflicting and violent-sounding: stories of arson and beatings and killings, the murder of Indians, cannibal tales and incidents of vandalism, humiliation of expatriates at roadblocks. The Uganda Army was said to be wild—furious that they had failed to capture the king. When darkness came, the gunfire started. I collected rumors in my specially begun curfew notebook.

Besides King Freddy, Kabaka of Buganda, there were three other kings. Sir William Wilberforce Nadiope, a fat little man noted for his bizarre robes and blustery speech, was Kyabazinga of Busoga. The Omukama of Toro was a twenty-year-old Mutoro named Patrick, whose sister Princess Elizabeth was a
Vogue
model. The Omugabe of Ankole was a cattle owner. When the Kabaka fell, the other kings caved in and went quietly, and the government commandeered their palaces—though “palace” was a misnomer for what were actually comically lopsided houses.

The curfew was a period of intense confusion and fear. There was widespread drunkenness too, which added to the atmosphere of insanity. People boasted of their boozing. No one worked. The urgency about drinking was marked, because the bars closed at six
P.M
. in order to allow people time to get home. Food was scarce because the trucks from the coast were held up at the Ugandan frontier. Matches became unobtainable, no one knew why. There was much petty crime: robberies, looting, a settling of scores. People traveled in convoys if they were headed upcountry. Mail was suspended for a week. The distant gunfire continued,
pok-pok-pok
, until dawn.

The curfew was for me an extraordinary event; it was also the perfect excuse. I did no teaching. I got on with my novel. I spent the day collecting rumors—always violent, always of massacres. Indi ans often figured in them. My curfew notebook thickened and I considered writing a book like Camus's
The Plague
, describing the deterioration of a city during a siege and curfew.

I realized that in time of war or anarchy people lived out their fantasies. There were many fights, but just as many love affairs. Scores were settled because the police were not a presence—the army was in charge, but its roadblocks were used for intimidation and robbery and, if the rumors were true, killings. Roadblocks were always manned by the most thuggish and rapacious soldiers. Most were from the far north, from a minority tribe noted for its ferocity.

I carried my curfew notebook to the Staff Club. Each rumor had a date, a time, a place.

“What is the point of that?” one colleague asked.

I said, “I want to calculate how many miles an hour a rumor travels.”

The breakdown of order had its excitements. People became reckless and slightly crazed. A Muganda man committed suicide after an atrocity in his village. His friends and family were summoned over the radio.

“He has hanged himself,” the announcer said.

My own fantasies took the form of being a real writer and writing all day. I had two books on the burner: my novel and this detailed curfew journal. In the late afternoon I hurried into town and got drunk as quickly as I could. I was energized by the tumult and the noise, which would, I knew, stop dead at seven, when we had to be indoors.