A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [105]
He said, “I’m glad Noimon has gone. Let him get a taste of the good life out there. I hope he relishes it. Shoba has some Ismaili friends in London. They’re having a very nice taste of the life over there. It isn’t all Harrods. They’ve written to Shoba. Ask her. She will tell you about her London friends. What they call a big house over there would be like a joke to us here. You’ve seen the salesmen at the van der Weyden. That’s expenses. Ask them how they live back home. None of them live as well as I live here.”
I thought later that it was the “I” in Mahesh’s last sentence that offended me. Mahesh could have put it better. That “I” gave me a glimpse of what had enraged Indar about his lunch with Mahesh and Shoba. Indar had said: “They don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. They don’t even know where I’ve been.” He had seen what I hadn’t seen: it was news to me that Mahesh thought he was living “well.” in the way he meant.
I hadn’t noticed any great change in his style. He and Shoba still lived in their concrete flat with the sitting room full of shiny things. But Mahesh wasn’t joking. Standing in his nice clothes by his imported coffee machine in his franchise-given shop, he really thought he was something, successful and complete, really thought he had made it and had nowhere higher to go. Bigburger and the boom—and Shoba, always there—had destroyed his sense of humour. And I used to think of him as a fellow survivor!
But it wasn’t for me to condemn him or the others. I was like them. I, too, wanted to stay with what I had; I, too, hated the idea that I might have been caught. I couldn’t say, as they did, that all was still for the best. But that, in effect, was my attitude. The very fact that the boom had passed its peak, that confidence had been shaken, became for me a good enough reason for doing nothing. That was how I explained the position to Nazruddin when he wrote from Uganda.
Nazruddin hardly wrote. But he was still gathering experience, his mind was still ticking over; and though his letters made me nervous before I opened them, I always read them with pleasure, because over and above his personal news there was always some new general point that Nazruddin wanted to make. We were still so close to our shock about Noimon that I thought, when Metty brought the letter from the post office, that the letter was going to be about Noimon or about the prospects for copper. But it was about Uganda. They were having their problems there too.
Things were bad in Uganda, Nazruddin wrote. The army people who had taken over had appeared to be all right at first, but now there were clear signs of tribal and racial troubles. And these troubles weren’t just going to blow over. Uganda was beautiful,fertile, easy, without poverty, and with high African traditions. It ought to have had a future, but the problem with Uganda was that it wasn’t big enough. The country was now too small for its tribal hatreds. The motorcar and modern roads had made the country too small; there would always be trouble. Every tribe felt more threatened in its territory now than in the days when everybody, including traders from the coast like our grandfathers, went about on foot, and a single trading venture could take up to a year. Africa, going back to its old ways with modern tools, was going to be a difficult place for some time. It was better to read the signs right than to hope that things would work out.
So for the third time in his life Nazruddin was thinking of moving and making a fresh start, this time out of Africa, in Canada. “But my luck is running out. I can see it in my hand.”
The letter, in spite of its disturbing news, was in Nazruddin’s old, calm style. It offered no direct advice and made no direct requests. But it was a reminder—as it was intended to be, especially at this time of upheaval for him—of my bargain with Nazruddin, my duty to his family and