A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [26]
At lunch one day Mahesh said, “What’s got into that boy of yours? He’s getting malin like the others.”
“Metty?”
“He came to see me the other day. He pretended he had known me a long time. He was showing off to the African boy he had with him. He said he was bringing me a customer. He said the African boy was Zabeth’s son and a good friend of yours.”
“I don’t know about good friend. What did he want?”
“Metty ran away just when I was beginning to get angry, and left the boy with me. The boy said he wanted a camera, but I don’t think he wanted anything at all. He just wanted to talk.”
I said, “I hope he showed you his money.”
“I didn’t have any cameras to show him. That was a bad business, Salim. Commission, commission all the way. You hardly get your money back in the end.”
The cameras were one of Mahesh’s ideas that had gone wrong. Mahesh was like that, always looking for the good business idea, and full of little ideas he quickly gave up. He had thought that the tourist trade was about to start again, with our town being the base for the game parks in the east. But the tourist trade existed only in the posters printed in Europe for the government in the capital. The game parks had gone back to nature, in a way never meant. The roads and rest houses, always rudimentary, had gone; the tourists (foreigners who might be interested in cut-price photographic equipment) hadn’t come. Mahesh had had to send his cameras east, using the staging posts that were still maintained by people like ourselves for the transport (legal or otherwise) of goods in any direction.
Mahesh said, “The boy said you were sending him to America or Canada to do his studies.”
“What am I sending him to study?”
“Business administration. So he can take over his mother’s business. Build it up.”
“Build it up! Buying a gross of razor blades and selling them one by one to fishermen.”
“I knew he was only trying to compromise you with your friends.”
Simple magic: if you say something about a man to his friends, you might get the man to do what you say he is going to do.
I said, “Ferdinand’s an African.”
When I next saw Ferdinand I said, “My friend Mahesh has been telling me that you are going to America to study business administration. Have you told your mother?”
He didn’t understand irony. This version of the story caught him unprepared, and he had nothing to say.
I said, “Ferdinand, you mustn’t go around telling people things that aren’t true. What do you mean by business administration?”
He said, “Bookkeeping, typing, shorthand. What you do.”
“I don’t do shorthand. And that’s not business administration. That’s a secretarial course. You don’t have to go to America or Canada to do that. You can do that right here. I am sure there are places in the capital. And when the time comes you’ll find you want to do more than that.”
He didn’t like what I said. His eyes began to go bright with humiliation and anger. But I didn’t stay for that. It was with Metty, and not me, that he had to settle accounts, if there were accounts to be settled.
He had found me as I was leaving to play squash at the Hellenic Club. Canvas shoes, shorts, racket, towel around my neck—it was like old times on the coast. I left the sitting room and stood in the passage, to give him the chance to leave, so that I could lock up. But he stayed in the sitting room, doubtless waiting for Metty.
I went out to the staircase landing. It was one of our days without electricity. The smoke from charcoal braziers and other open fires rose blue among the imported ornamental trees—cassia, breadfruit, frangipani, flamboyant—and gave a touch of the forest village to a residential area where, as I had heard, in the old days neither Africans nor Asians were permitted to live. I knew the trees