A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [37]
The big boy, almost a man, sobbed, “I didn’t want to come here. I don’t know anyone here. My mother wanted me to come. I didn’t want to be in the town or go to the lycée. Why did she send me to the lycée?”
It was a comfort to us, Metty and myself, to have someone to comfort. We decided that Ferdinand was to sleep in Metty’s room, and we dug out some bedding for him. The attention calmed Ferdinand down. We ate early, while it was still light. Ferdinand was silent then. But later, when we were in our different rooms, he and Metty talked.
I heard Metty say: “They came to a bridge. And all the trucks stalled and the guns began to bend.”
Metty’s voice was high-pitched and excited. That wasn’t the voice he had used when he had given me the news in the morning. He was talking now like the local Africans, from whom he had got the story.
In the morning the market square outside the shop didn’t come to life at all. The town remained empty. The squatters and campers in the street seemed to have gone into hiding.
When I went to Shoba and Mahesh’s flat for lunch I noticed that their better carpets had disappeared, and some of the finer glassware and silver, and the crystal figure of the nude woman. Shoba looked strained, especially around her eyes, and Mahesh seemed more nervous of her than of anything else. Shoba’s mood always dictated the mood of our lunch, and she seemed that day to want to punish us for the good lunch she had prepared. We ate for some time in silence, Shoba looking down at the table with her tired eyes, Mahesh constantly looking at her.
Shoba said, “I should have been at home this week. My father is sick. Did I tell you, Salim? I should have been with him. And it is his birthday.”
Mahesh’s eyes hopped about the table. Spoiling the effect of the words that I had found so wise, he said, “We’ll carry on. It will be all right. The new President’s not a fool. He isn’t just going to stay in his house like the last man, and do nothing.”
She said, “Carry on, carry on. That’s all I’ve been doing. That’s how I’ve spent my life. That’s how I’ve lived in this place, among Africans. Is that a life, Salim?”
She looked at her plate, not at me. And I said nothing.
Shoba said, “I’ve wasted my life, Salim. You don’t know how I’ve wasted my life. You don’t know how I live in fear in this place. You don’t know how frightened I was when I heard about you, when I heard that a stranger had come to the town. I’ve got to be frightened of everybody, you know.” Her eyes twitched. She stopped eating, and pressed her cheekbones with the tips of her fingers, as though pressing away a nervous pain. “I come from a well-to-do family, a rich family. You know that. My family had plans for me. But then I met Mahesh. He used to own a motorcycle shop. Something terrible happened. I slept with him almost as soon as I met him. You know us and our ways well enough to know that that was a terrible thing for me to do. But it was terrible for me in another way as well. I didn’t want to get to know anybody else after that. That has been my curse. Why aren’t you eating, Salim? Eat, eat. We must carry on.”
Mahesh’s lips came together nervously, and he looked a little foolish. At the same time his eyes brightened at the praise contained in the complaining words; yet he and Shoba had been together for nearly ten years.
“My family beat up Mahesh terribly. But that just made me more determined. My brothers threatened to throw acid on me. They were serious. They also threatened to kill Mahesh.