A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [127]
It was in this state of indifference and irresponsibility—like the lost Gloucester Road people Nazruddin had spoken about—that I became engaged to Kareisha.
One day, near the end of my time in London, Kareisha said, “Have you been to see Indar? Are you going to see him?”
Indar! His name had come up often in our talk, but I didn’t know that he was in London.
Kareisha said, “That’s just as well. I wouldn’t recommend a visit or trying to get in touch or anything like that. He can be difficult and aggressive when he’s in the mood, and it isn’t funny. He’s been like that ever since his outfit folded.”
“His outfit folded?”
“About two years ago.”
“But he knew it was going to fold. He talked as though he expected it to fold. Lecturers, universities, African interchange—he knew the excitement couldn’t last, that no local government really cared one way or the other. But I thought he had his plans. He said he could exploit himself in lots of other ways.”
Kareisha said: “It was different when the time came. He cared more about his outfit than he pretended. Of course, there are many things he can do. But he’s determined not to do them. He can get a job in a university, certainly in America. He has the contacts. He can write for the papers. We don’t talk about it now when we see him. Naz’ says Indar’s become help-resistant. The trouble is he invested too much in that outfit of his. And after it folded he had that bad experience in America. A bad experience for him anyway.
“You know Indar. You know that when he was young the most important thing to him was that his family was rich. You remember the house they lived in. When you live in a house like that, I suppose you think ten or twelve or twenty times a day that you are very rich or that you are richer than nearly everybody else. And you remember how he used to get on. Not talking about money, but it was always there. You would say that he felt that money had made him holy. All rich people are like that, I suppose. And that was one idea about himself that Indar never lost. His outfit didn’t give him back his money, but it made him holy again. It raised him again above everybody else and made him equal with the big boys of Africa, being a guest of the government in this place and that place, meeting foreign ministers and presidents. So it was a blow when the outfit folded, when the Americans decided there was nothing in it for them.
“Indar went to America, to New York. Being Indar, he stayed in an expensive hotel. He saw his American people. They were all very nice. But he didn’t like the direction in which they were pushing him. He felt they were pushing him towards smaller things and he pretended not to notice. I don’t know what Indar was expecting from these people. No, I know. He was hoping to be made one of them, to keep on at the old level. He thought that was his due. He was spending a lot of money, and the money was running out. One day, much against his will, he even looked at cheaper hotels. He didn’t want to do that because he thought that even to start looking for cheaper hotels was to admit that it soon might be over for him. He was appalled by the cheaper hotels. In New York you drop fast, he said.
“There was one man in particular he used to deal with. He had met this man in London right at the beginning, and they had become friends. It wasn’t always like that. In the beginning he had thought the man foolish and had been aggressive with him. That used to embarrass Indar, because it was this man who had brought him out of the mess he was in the first time in London. This man had given Indar back his confidence then, had made him think positively about Africa and himself. It was this man who had drawn the good ideas out of Indar. Indar had grown to depend on this man. He thought of him as his equal, and you will know what I mean by that.
“They used to meet in New York. Lunch, drinks, meetings in the office. But nothing seemed to be happening. It was always just