A Bend in the River (24 page)

“I’m a lucky man. I carry the world within me. You see, Salim, in this world beggars are the only people who can be choosers. Everyone else has his side chosen for him. I can choose. The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it. You can be sentimental and embrace the idea of your own defeat. You can be an Indian diplomat and always be on the losing side. It’s like banking. It is stupid setting up as a banker in Kenya or the Sudan. That was more or less what my family did on the coast. What do the banks say in their annual reports about those places? That many of the people are ‘Outside the monetary sector’? You’re not going to be a Rothschild there. The Rothschilds are what they are because they chose Europe at the right time. The other Jews, just as talented, who went to bank for the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey or Egypt or wherever, didn’t do so well. Nobody knows their names. And that’s what we’ve been doing for centuries. We’ve been clinging to the idea of defeat and forgetting that we are men like everybody else. We’ve been choosing the wrong side. I’m tired of being on the losing side. I don’t want to pass. I know exactly who I am and where I stand in the world. But now I want to win and win and win.”

Indar had begun his story at the end of that evening at Raymond and Yvette’s. He had added to it at different times later. He had begun his story on the first evening I had seen Yvette, and whenever I saw Yvette afterwards she was in his company. I had trouble with both their personalities: I could pin down neither.

In my mind I had my own picture of Yvette, and this never varied. But the person I saw, at different times of day, in different kinds of light and weather, in circumstances so different from those in which I had first seen her, was always new, always a surprise. I was nervous of looking at her face—I was becoming obsessed with her.

And Indar too began to change for me. His personality too had a dissolving quality. As he filled in his story he became in my eyes quite unlike the man who had presented himself in my shop many weeks before. In his clothes then I had seen London and privilege. I had seen that he was fighting to keep up his style, but I hadn’t thought of his style as something he had created for himself. I had seen him more as a man touched by the glamour of the great world; and I had thought that given the chance to be in his world, I, too, would have been touched by the same glamour. In those early days I had often wanted to say to him: “Help me to get away from this place. Show me how to make myself like you.”

But that wasn’t so now. I could no longer envy his style or his stylishness. I saw it as his only asset. I felt protective towards him. I felt that since that evening at Yvette’s—the evening which had lifted me up but cast him down—we had exchanged roles. I no longer looked on him as my guide; he was the man who needed to be led by the hand.

That perhaps was the secret of his social success which I had envied. My wish—which must have been like the wish of the people in London he had told me about, who had made room for him—was to clear away the aggressiveness and the depression

t
hat choked the tenderness I knew was there. I was protective towards him and towards his stylishness, his exaggerations, his delusions. I wished to keep all those from hurt. It saddened me that in a little while he would have to leave, to carry on with his lecturer’s duties elsewhere. That was what, from his story, I judged him to be—a lecturer, as uncertain of his future in this role as he had been in his previous roles.

The only friends in the town I had introduced him to were Shoba and Mahesh. They were the only people I thought he would have had something in common with. But that hadn’t worked. There was suspicion on both sides. These three people were in many ways alike—renegades, concerned with their personal beauty, finding in that beauty the easiest form of dignity. Each saw the other as another version of himself; and they were like people—Shoba and Mahesh on one side, Indar on the other—sniffing out the falseness in one another.

At lunch in their flat one day—a good lunch: they had gone to a lot of trouble: silver and brass polished, the curtains drawn to keep out the glare, the three-stemmed standard lamp lighting up the Persian carpet on the wall—Shoba asked Indar, “Is there any money in what you do?” Indar had said, “I get by.” But outside, in the sunlight and red dust, he raged. As we drove back to the Domain, his home, he said, “Your friends don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. They don’t even know where I’ve been.” He wasn’t referring to his travels; he meant they hadn’t appreciated the kind of battles he had fought. “Tell them that my value is the value I place on myself. There is no reason why it couldn’t be fifty thousand dollars a year, a hundred thousand dollars a year.”

That was his mood as his time at the Domain came to an end. He was more easily irritated and depressed. But for me, even during those racing days, the Domain remained a place of possibility. I was looking for a repeat of the evening I had had—the mood of the Joan Baez songs, reading lamps and African mats on the floor, a disturbing woman in black slacks, a walk to the rapids below a moon and drifting cloud. It began to feel like fantasy; I kept it secret from Indar. And Yvette, whenever I saw her, in harsher electric light or ordinary daylight, confounded
me again and again, so different from what I remembered.

The days passed; the polytechnic term was over. Indar said goodbye abruptly one afternoon, like a man who didn’t want to make too much fuss about a goodbye; he didn’t want me to see him off. And I felt that the Domain, and the life there, had been closed to me forever.

Ferdinand too was going away. He was going to the capital to take up his administrative cadetship. And it was Ferdinand whom I went to see off on the steamer at the end of the term. The hyacinths of the river, floating on: during the days of the rebellion they had spoken of blood; on heavy afternoons of heat and glitter they had spoken of experience without savour; white in moonlight, they had matched the mood of a particular evening. Now, lilac on bright green, they spoke of something over, other people moving on.

The steamer had arrived the previous afternoon with its passenger barge in tow. It hadn’t brought Zabeth and her dugout. Ferdinand hadn’t wanted her to be there. I had told Zabeth this was only because Ferdinand was at the age when he wanted to appear quite independent. And this was true up to a point. The journey to the capital was important to Ferdinand; and because it was important, he wished to play it down.

He had always seen himself as important. But this was part of the new unsurprised attitude to himself that he had developed. From dugout to a first-class cabin on the steamer, from a forest village to the polytechnic to an administrative cadetship—he had leapt centuries. His passage hadn’t always been easy; during the rebellion he had wanted to run away and hide. But he had since learned to accept all sides of himself and all sides of the country; he rejected nothing. He knew only his country and what it offered; and all that his country offered him he wished now to take as his due. It was like arrogance; but it was also a form of ease and acceptance. He was at home in every setting, he accepted every situation; and he was himself everywhere.

That was what he demonstrated that morning when I picked him up from the Domain to drive him to the dock. The change from the Domain to the shanty settlements outside—with their
scattered plantings of maize, their runnels of filth and mounds of sifted rubbish—jarred more on me than on him. I would have preferred, being with him, and thinking of his pride, to ignore them; he spoke about them, not critically, but seeing them as part of his town. At the Domain, saying goodbye to people he knew, he had behaved like the administrative cadet; with me in the car he had been like an old friend; and then outside the dock gates he had become a reasonably happy, and patient, member of an African crowd, taken with the market bustle.

Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi.
I had long since ceased to reflect on the vainglory of the words. The monument had only become part of the market scene on steamer days. Through that crowd we now began to make our way, accompanied by an old man, feebler than either of us, who had taken possession of Ferdinand’s suitcases.

Basins of grubs and caterpillars; baskets of trussed-up hens, squawking when they were lifted by one wing by the vendor or a prospective buyer; dull-eyed goats on the bare, scuffed ground, chewing at rubbish and even paper; damp-haired young monkeys, full of misery, tethered tightly around their narrow waists and nibbling at peanuts and banana skin and mango skin, but nibbling without relish, as though they knew that they themselves were soon to be eaten.

Nervous passengers from the bush, barge passengers, travelling from one far-off village to another, and being seen off by families or friends; the established vendors in their established places (two or three at the foot of the monument), with their box seats, cooking stones, pots and pans, bundles, babies; idlers, cripples and scroungers. And officials.

There were many more officials nowadays, and most of them appeared to be active in this area on steamer days. Not all of them were in police or army uniform, and not all of them were men. In the name of his dead mother, the hotel maid, “the woman of Africa,” as he called her in his speeches, the President had decided to honour as many women as possible; and he had done so by making them government servants, not always with clear duties.

Ferdinand and myself and the porter made a noticeable group
(Ferdinand much taller than the men of the region), and we were stopped about half a dozen times by people who wanted to see our papers. Once we were stopped by a woman in a long African-style cotton dress. She was as small as her sisters who poled the dugouts in village creeks, and fetched and carried; her head was as hairless and looked as shaved; but her face had plumped out. She spoke to us roughly. She held Ferdinand’s steamer tickets (one for the fare, one for the food) upside down when she examined them; and she frowned.

Ferdinand’s face registered nothing. When she gave him back the tickets he said, “Thank you,
citoyenne.”
He spoke without irony; the woman’s frown was replaced by a smile. And that seemed to have been the main point of the exercise—the woman wanted to be shown respect and to be called
citoyenne. Monsieur
and
madame
and
boy
had been officially outlawed; the President had decreed us all to be
citoyens
and
citoyennes.
He used the two words together in his speeches, again and again, like musical phrases.

We moved through the waiting crowd—people made room for us simply because we were moving—to the dock gates. And there our porter, as though knowing what was to follow, dropped his load, asked for a lot of francs, quickly settled for less, and bolted. The gates, for no reason, were closed against us. The soldiers looked at us and then looked away, refusing to enter into the palaver Ferdinand and I tried to get going. For half an hour or more we stood there in the crowd, pressed against the gate, in the stinging sun, in the smell of sweat and smoked food; and then, for no apparent reason, one of the soldiers opened the gate and let us in, but just us, not anyone behind, as though, in spite of Ferdinand’s tickets and my own dock pass, he was doing us a great favour.

The steamer was still pointing towards the rapids. The white superstructure, with the first-class cabins, just visible above the customs-shed roof, was at the stern end of the steamer. On the steel-plated deck below, just a few feet above the water, a range of iron-clad barrack-like structures ran all the way to the rounded bow. The iron barracks were for the lesser passengers.
And for passengers who were least of all there was the barge—tiers of cages on a shallow iron hull, the cages wire-netted and barred, the wire netting and bars dented and twisted, the internal organization of the cages hidden, lost in gloom, in spite of the sunlight and the glitter of the river.

The first-class cabins still suggested luxury. The iron walls were white; the timbered decks were scrubbed and tarred. The doors were open; there were curtains. There were stewards and even a purser.

I said to Ferdinand, “I thought those people down there were going to ask you for your certificate of civic merit. In the old days you had to have one before they let you up here.”

He didn’t laugh, as an older man might have done. He didn’t know about the colonial past. His memories of the larger world began with the mysterious day when mutinous soldiers, strangers, had come to his mother’s village looking for white people to kill, and Zabeth had frightened them off, and they had taken away only a few of the village women.

To Ferdinand the colonial past had vanished. The steamer had always been African, and first class on the steamer was what he could see now. Respectably dressed Africans, the older men in suits, the evolved men of an earlier generation; some women with families, everyone dressed up for the journey; one or two of the old ladies of such families, closer to the ways of the forest, already sitting on the floor of their cabins and preparing lunch, breaking the black hulls of smoked fish and smoked monkeys into enamel plates with coloured patterns, and releasing strong, salty smells.