A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [38]
Mahesh said, “That was a joke.”
“No, that wasn’t a joke. That was true. Anybody could come here—they could send anybody. It doesn’t have to be an Asian. It could be a Belgian or a Greek or any European. It could be an African. How am I to know?”
She did all the talking at lunch, and Mahesh let her; he seemed to have handled this kind of situation before. Afterwards I drove him back to the centre of the town—he said he didn’t want to take his car in. His nervousness disappeared as soon as we left Shoba. He didn’t seem embarrassed by what Shoba had said about their life together, and made no comment about it.
He said, as we drove through the dusty red streets, “Shoba exaggerates. Things are not as bad as she believes. The new man’s no fool. The steamer came in this morning with the white men. You didn’t know? Go across to the van der Weyden and you’ll see a few of them. The new man might be a maid’s son. But he’s going to hold it together. He’s going to use this to put a lot of people in their place. Go to the van der Weyden. It will give you an idea of what things were like after independence.”
Mahesh was right. The steamer had arrived; I had a glimpse of it when we drove by the docks. It hadn’t hooted and I hadn’t looked for it earlier. Low-decked, flat-bottomed, it was almost hidden by the customs sheds, all but the top of the superstructure at the rear. And when I stopped outside Mahesh’s shop, which was opposite the van der Weyden, I saw a number of army vehicles, and some civilian trucks and taxis that had been commandeered.
Mahesh said, “It’s a good thing Africans have short memories. Go and have a look at the people who’ve come to save them from suicide.”
The van der Weyden was a modern building, four stories high, concrete and straight lines, part of the pre-independence boom; and in spite of all that it had gone through, it still pretended to be a modern hotel. It had many glass doors at pavement level; the lobby had a mosaic floor; there were lifts (not reliable now); there was a reception desk with a pre-independence airline advertisement and a permanent Hôtel Complet (“No Vacancies”) sign—which hadn’t been true for some years.
I had expected a crowd in the lobby, noise, rowdiness. I found the place looking emptier than usual, and it was almost hushed. But the hotel had guests: on the mosaic floor there were about twenty or thirty suitcases with identical blue tie-on labels printed Hazel’s Travels. The lifts weren’t working, and a single hotel boy—a small old man wearing the servant costume of the colonial time: short khaki trousers, short-sleeved shirt, and a large, coarse white apron over that—had the job of taking the suitcases up the terrazzo steps at the side of the lift. He was working under the direct supervision of the big-bellied African (from downriver somewhere) who normally stood behind the reception desk cleaning his teeth with a toothpick and being rude to everybody, but was now standing by the suitcases and trying to look busy and serious.
Some of the hotel’s new guests were in the patio bar, where there were a few green palms and creepers in concrete pots. The terrazzo floor here sloped from all sides to a central grille, and from this grille there always came, but especially after rain, a smell of the sewer. In this smell—not particularly bad now: it was dry and hot, a triangle of sunlight dazzled on one wall—the white men sat, eating the van der Weyden’s sandwiches and drinking lager.
They wore civilian clothes, but they would have been a noticeable crowd anywhere. An ordinary bar crowd would have had some flabby types and