A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [126]
“This place is so big and busy you take some time to see that very little is happening. It’s just keeping itself going. A lot of people have been quietly wiped out. There’s no new money, no real money, and this makes everybody more desperate. We’ve come here at the wrong time. But never mind. It’s the wrong time everywhere else too. When we were in Africa in the old days, consulting our catalogues and ordering our goods and watching the ships unload in the harbour, I don’t suppose we thought it would be like this in Europe, or that the British passports we took out as protection against the Africans would actually bring us here, and that the Arabs would be in the streets outside.”
That was Nazruddin. Kareisha said, “I hope you know you’ve been listening to the story of a happy man.” She didn’t have to tell me.
Nazruddin was all right. He had made himself at home in the Gloucester Road. The London setting was strange, but Nazruddin appeared to be as he had always been. He had moved on from fifty to sixty, but he didn’t look particularly older. He still wore his old-style suits; and the broad lapels (with the curling tips) which I associated with him were back in fashion. I didn’t think he doubted that his property venture would eventually right itself. What oppressed him (and made him talk about his luck running out) was his inactivity. But he had found in the half mile or so of the Gloucester Road, between the underground railway station and the park, the perfect retirement resort.
He bought his newspaper in one shop, read it with morning coffee in a tiny café that also offered old watercolour paintings for sale; took a turn in the park; shopped for delicacies in the various food shops. Sometimes he gave himself the luxury of tea or a drink in the big, old-fashioned lounge of the red-brick hotel near the station. Sometimes he went to the Arab or Persian “Dancing Room.” And there was the nightly excitement of television in the flat. The population of the Gloucester Road was cosmopolitan, always shifting, with people of all ages. It was a friendly, holiday place, and Nazruddin’s days were full of encounters and new observations. He said it was the best street in the world; he intended to stay there as long as he was allowed to.
He had chosen well once again. That had always been his gift, to suggest that he had chosen well. At one time it had made me anxious to find the world he had found. Nazruddin’s example, or the way in which I had secretly interpreted his experience, had after all helped to determine my life. Now in London, glad though I was to find him in good spirits, that gift of his depressed me. It made me feel that after all these years I had never caught up with him, and never would; that my life would always be unsatisfactory. It could send me back to my hotel room in an agony of solitude and dread.
Sometimes as I was falling asleep I was kicked awake by some picture that came to me of my African town—absolutely real (and the airplane could take me there tomorrow), but its associations made it dream-like. Then I remembered my illumination, about the need of men only to live, about the illusion of pain. I played off London against Africa until both became unreal, and I could fall asleep. After a time I didn’t have to call up the illumination, the mood of that African morning. It was there, beside me, that remote vision of the planet, of men lost in space and time,