A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [49]
I looked in my science magazines and children’s encyclopaedia parts (I had grown to love those) and read up on uranium. Uranium is one of those things we all hear about but not many of us know about. Like oil. I used to think, from hearing and reading about oil reservoirs, that oil ran in trapped underground streams. It was my encyclopaedia parts which told me that oil reservoirs were of stone and could even be of marble, with the oil in tiny pockets. It was in just such a way, I suppose, that the general, hearing of the immense value of uranium, had thought of it as a kind of super-precious metal, a kind of gold nugget. Mancini the consul, must have thought so too. My reading told me of tons and tons of ore that had to be processed and reduced—but reduced to hefty blocks.
The general, offering a “piece,” might have been duped himself. But for some reason—Mahesh might have told him he was being watched—he never troubled Mahesh again. And not long afterwards he was posted away from our town. It was the method of the new President: he gave his men power and authority, but he never allowed them to settle in anywhere and become local kings. He saved us a lot of trouble.
Mahesh went on as coolly as before. The only man who had had a fright was Mancini, the consul.
That was what we were like in those days. We felt that there was treasure around us, waiting to be picked up. It was the bush that gave us this feeling. During the empty, idle time, we had been indifferent to the bush; during the days of the rebellion it had depressed us. Now it excited us—the unused earth, with the promise of the unused. We forgot that others had been here before us, and had felt like us.
I shared in the boom. I was energetic in my own modest way. But I was also restless. You so quickly get used to peace. It is like being well—you take it for granted, and forget that when you were ill, to be well again had seemed everything. And with peace and the boom I began to see the town as ordinary, for the first time.
The flat, the shop, the market outside the shop, the Hellenic Club, the bars, the life of the river, the dugouts, the water hyacinths—I knew it so well. And especially on hot sunny afternoons—that hard light, those black shadows, that feeling of stillness—it seemed without further human promise.
I didn’t see myself spending the rest of my days at that bend in the river, like Mahesh and the others. In my own mind I separated myself from them. I still thought of myself as a man just passing through. But where was the good place? I couldn’t say. I never thought constructively about it. I was waiting for some illumination to come to me, to guide me to the good place and the “life” I was still waiting for.
From time to time now letters from my father on the coast reminded me of his wish to see me settled—married to Nazruddin’s daughter: that was almost like a family commitment. But I was less prepared than ever for that. Though it was a comfort on occasion to play with the idea that outside this place a whole life waited for me, all the relationships that bind a man to the earth and give him a feeling of having a place. But I knew that it wasn’t like that really. I knew that for us the world was no longer as safe as that.
And again events caught up with my anxieties. There was trouble in Uganda, where Nazruddin had a cotton-ginning business. Uganda up till then had been the secure and well-run country Nazruddin had tried to excite us about, the country which received refugees from neighbouring countries. Now in Uganda itself a king was overthrown and forced to flee; Daulat brought back stories of yet another army on the loose. Nazruddin, as I remembered, lived with the knowledge that, after all his luck, things were going to end badly for him; and I thought that his luck had run out now. But I was wrong; Nazruddin’s luck was still with him. The trouble in Uganda didn’t last; only the king suffered. Life there went back to normal. But I began to fear for Nazruddin and his